What happened
The town of Peterborough, New Hampshire discovered in summer 2021 that about $2.3 million of payments had been diverted to fraudsters. The account of a town finance staff member had been compromised in April, and the attackers used it to redirect payments due to the ConVal School District and to a bridge contractor. The US Secret Service recovered $594,331; the rest had been moved on or converted to cryptocurrency.
How the deception worked
After taking over a town finance employee's email account, the attackers read the genuine correspondence with two payees, the regional school district and a bridge construction contractor, both of which had asked to be paid by electronic transfer. They then inserted themselves into those live threads with revised banking details, and deleted the payees' incoming emails so that the real counterparties' queries never reached town staff. The town had procedures requiring notarised change forms and confirmatory phone calls, but staff who were supposed to check each other's work did not follow them, which is what let the diverted payments clear.
The control that would have caught it· our reading, not a claim from the sources
Existing verification procedures only work if they are enforced; mailbox rule creation and mass deletion in a finance account should also raise an automatic alert.
Sources (2)
- Peterborough payment scam: Single compromised email account led to $2.3M theftMonadnock Ledger-Transcript·ledgertranscript.comOpen ↗
- Cyber-thieves Scam New Hampshire Town Out of $2.3mInfosecurity Magazine·infosecurity-magazine.comOpen ↗
This entry summarises public reporting. It is not a legal finding, and details can change as investigations conclude. Found an error? Send a correction.