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Could a Phone Call Save You $8 Million? Ask Conde Nast

Hear that noise? Yeah? That's the sound of heads rolling in the accounting department at Conde Nast.

The publishing company behind titles including The New Yorker, GQ, Glamour, and Wired has been busy extricating itself from a scam that cost it something like $8 million

 since late last year. Worse yet, Conde Nast had no clue anything was wrong until an irate vendor started nagging them.

That's a lot of cash. The people responsible for this con must really be some evil geniuses, right?

Not exactly. Turns out the scammer was some knucklehead in Alvin, Tex. who scored $8 million in phony payments over the course of several months -- and then neglected to withdraw any of it before the Feds came calling.

Oh, and Mr. Knucklehead used his real name and address to set up the scam.

Here's the grift: This guy posed as the vendor that does all of Conde Nast's printing. He then sent an email asking Conde Nast to start sending its payments to a new bank account. Conde Nast was happy to oblige, at least until the real vendor started to complain that it wasn't getting paid.

You can't make this stuff up. Really.

Let's be charitable and assume that Conde Nast doesn't hire a bunch of senile Cocker Spaniels to handle its accounting chores. So how could this possibly happen?

I'm sure it's the same old story. Everybody and nobody was responsible for vetting vendor requests. There's a process in place to handle such requests, but it consists entirely of going through the same motions, over and over again, ad nauseum. Nobody asked questions because nothing had ever gone wrong before -- and hey, who would possibly try to pull a hare-brained stunt like this?

Some mouth-breather in Alvin, Tex., that's who. Glad we're all straight on that point now.

This may sound like the kind of problem that only a big, bureaucratic company could have. A smaller company would have noticed something amiss and picked up the phone or at least asked a few questions, right?

Don't go there. The people who think their companies and their employees are too smart to fall for this kind of stuff are usually the ones who take the worst beatings. Complacency kills.

Never, ever assume that you're too smart and too savvy to fall prey to a phishing attack, which is basically what the Conde Nast scam turned out to be. Don't just empower your employees to ask questions; make it an absolutely essential part of their jobs. Show the door to timid souls who are afraid to raise a false alarm, and celebrate your resident conspiracy nuts who see a potential scam behind every incoming email.

Above all, teach your employees that the phone is the single most powerful weapon in the fight against fraud. If a Conde Nast employee had bothered to call the real vendor at its published number and asked exactly one question -- did you send this email? -- none of this would have happened.

Oh, and if you get any resumes from recently-departed Conde Nast accountants, take a pass. Some people never learn.