​Scammers target County vendors with email spoofing seeking sensitive information

• A scammer pretending to be a County official is targeting County vendors seeking sensitive financial information.
• An employee reported the incident to the IT and the sheriff.

The scammer who pretended to be a Sedgwick County employee managed to ‘spoof’ a county email address and sent an official-looking email to several vendors asking for information on the past financial transactions with the County.

One of the vendors contacted the County employee after receiving the suspicious email. The employee immediately reported the incident to the Information Technology Department and the sheriff.

More details on the scam

No money or sensitive information is believed to have been exchanged, said a statement issued by the county on 18, December 2018.“The emails were generated by a malicious actor who is unassociated with Sedgwick County,” Joe Currier of the IT department said in that statement.

The email scam came to light after a vendor who received the suspicious email contacted one of the employees to investigate the email. A spokesman for Sedgwick County disclosed that the employee appropriately informed the right person in finance.

“The county has been working to get a word out to its vendors to watch out for suspect communications purporting to come from the government,” Van Williams, the spokesman for County said.

It is to be noted that the county Finance Department got tricked two years back into handing over $566,000 when a man spoofing himself as an employee of Cornejo and Sons Construction got the county to change the bank routing number on a contract payment in September 2016.