The Norwegian Investment Fund, the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, has been conned out of $10 million due to what the company described as “an advanced data breach”.
In a statement released Wednesday the company explained that fraudsters were able to access information related to a loan of USD 10 million (approx. 100 million NOK) from Norfund to a microfinance institution in Cambodia. The crooks, apparently, manipulated and falsified information exchange between Norfund and a finance company, tricking Norfund into sending funds into a separate account in Mexico owned by the hackers.
Norfund said the fraud took place on March 16th but was discovered on April 30th when the scammers made another fraud attempt which the company managed to block.
“So far, Norfund has not uncovered any further fraud attempts beyond the two above mentioned incidents,” the company said.
“We are now working to get a full overview of the sequence of events and take appropriate measures to strengthen our routines and systems in order to prevent this from happening again. The fact that this has happened shows that our existing systems and routines were not secure enough,” Norfund added.