ALAMANCE COUNTY, N.C. — The Alamance-Burlington School System nearly lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to scammers.
According to the school system, the finance department received an email from what appeared to be a vendor ABSS used on Aug. 28, 2023.
The senders claimed to be from Central Builders, emailing to cover a portion of the contract to cover the new track and stormwater solutions at Cummings High School, a project the district has been working on for a while.
Those posing as Central Builders told ABSS in an e-mail it was switching its bank information and updated the district with the information to make payments.
"It looked just like the original e-mail we always get except there was one little part of the domain that was different," said ABSS PIO Les Atkins.
ABSS pushed a payment of $302,000 forward on Sept. 8, 2023.
But, it wasn’t legit – it was a phishing scam.
Luckily, the bank held the payment for a few days due to the size of it being so large.
"Our bank was able to contact the scammers bank and fortunately they still had a hold on the money because they were following their protocol to hold large amounts of money for a couple of days," Atkins said. "Fortunately we were able to get that money back."
A very close call, but luckily the scammers did not receive any money.
ABSS said it's not adding any extra layers of protection but it's technology team plans to be extra cautious because next time they might not be so lucky.
Hossein Sarrafzadeh is a part of North Carolina A&T's cybersecurity research team.
He said there's been a 17% increase in attacks on school systems since last year.
According to Cyber Security Insiders Alamance Community College was one of 900 colleges and universities that fell victim to ransomware over the summer. It's not clear the outcome.
"They attack their health data, their personal details and parents details," Sarrafzadeh said. "People on the dark web can exploit them and make money."
Hackers are getting a hold of all types of government agencies' information like employee data for the city of Hendersonville, south of Asheville.
After the hack last month the city brought in third-party cybersecurity experts to better protect them.
Sarrafzadeh said NC A&T is looking into providing those same services to school systems.
"We do security monitoring we could provide a monitoring system to schools and when these threats come we can inform them to can be careful about it," Sarrafzadeh said.
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