Scammer Spoofs A City Supplier, Steals $1.5 Million From Baltimore
Security Boulevard, Monday, September 1st, 2025
The City of Baltimore, which was scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in two incidents in 2019 and 2022 through fraudulent vendor schemes, was hit with a similar attack earlier this year when a bad actor took it for more than $1.5 million.
The scammer was able to spoof a vendor, access the vendor's Workday account and trick employees in the city's Accounts Payable Department to change banking details and send two payments to an account controlled by the fraudster at another financial institution, according to a recent report by Baltimore's Office of the Inspector General (OIG).
'The investigation revealed a lack of internal policies and procedures in AP 'accounts payable' regarding vendor verification,' the inspector general, Isabel Mercedes Cummings, wrote in the report, adding that 'the internal controls established as a result of the form OIG investigations 'from 2019 and 2022' were not being utilized at the time of these incidents.'