Sohu's staff lose more than 40,000 yuan due to email scam

Over two dozen employees at Chinese Internet portal operator Sohu have lost more than 40,000 (US$6,000) yuan after they fell victim to an email scam, which offered “allowances” to recipients providing their bank account and personal details. A statement posted on the company’s Weibo account confirmed that an employee’s email had been hacked and used to send mail purportedly from the company’s corporate finance department, offering recipients “allowances” if they could provide their band account and personal identification details.

The incident was then handed over to the firm’s technical department in due course, however, since many believed that the email was true and authentic, the scam had cost them over 40,000 yuan of loss. The statement also stated that the case has been reported to the police for further investigation. The report also said some of the duped employees lost their savings after providing their banking data.

Charles Zhang Chaoyang, Sohu founder, said in a statement on Weibo that the incident "isn't as severe as people assume". He added that measures taken by the company's technology department kept the total financial loss to below 50,000 yuan, and the incident did not affect the email services of all Sohu users.

Commenting on the email scam incident, Francis Fong, honorary chairman of Hong Kong Association of Interactive Marketing said it is hard to filter all scammers especially when a company email is sent internally, “The best solution to this is to educate employees to not click on external links, and the company should also be transparent about the message, whether it is offering the allowances or not.”

Meanwhile, Duncan Chiu, Legco member for the Technology and Innovation functional constituency said that the situation is worrying as the scam emails could be more surreal once the scammers obtained the personal data of the victims, “That’s why education of employees are always important, and of course companies could consider setting up a central message delivery system to for employees to fact check any internal policy changes.”

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