Even though management rights operations is a hands on business, it is not immune to cyber fraud and hacking.
We got email hacked actually in 2019 although the loss was minimal as only two tenants transferred money. However, its best to take the utmost precaution and insure against such risks. In 2020 a popular fraud was hackers taking access of business email and impersonating property managers, offering tenants a 10% “Covid discount” on rentals if rents were paid 6months in advance upfront. An instruction was then directed to the tenants to transfer prepayments into a different bank account if they wanted to apply the discount. A handful of victims to this fraud were mislead and this led to business owners having to compromise money lost on fraud. A reminder that the basic business insurance does not cover for such losses. In summary, we highly recommend 1.) to make sure business insurance covers cyber fraud, and if it does not, to add on separate cyber insurance 2.) use two factor authentication even for emails. A lot of the business insurance doesn't cover for cyber fraud so check. I had to add cyber fraud to our insurance.
Comments