BOSTON: Save the Children said on Thursday hackers had stolen its nearly $1 million through a sophisticated email scam.

According to a report in The Boston Globe, scammers hacked into the email of a worker at the charity’s US offices last year, posed as an employee, and created false invoices and other documents to fool the nonprofit into sending nearly $1m to a fraudulent entity in Japan. The scammers claimed the money was needed to purchase solar panels for health centres in Pakistan, a country where Save the Children has worked for decades.

The Save the Children Federation, the Fairfield, Connecticut-based US affiliate of the international organisation, said its insurance reimbursed all but $112,000 of the stolen funds.

Published in Dawn, December 14th, 2018