A big, red warning on the online home page for WESCO Distribution alerts suppliers to the possibility that orders being placed allegedly for WESCO are in fact the work of a team of international thieves:
**Security Caution**
Vendors Encouraged to Verify Any Suspected Fraudulent WESCO Purchase Orders
The warning has been up on the company’s site for more than a year, said Dan Brailer, vice president, treasurer and head of legal and investor relations for the Pittsburgh-based electrical distribution chain. The company posted it after learning of a scam perpetrated by organized criminals using WESCO’s name.
Typically, the scam artists would call suppliers, pose as WESCO officers and ask to place an order. None of the suppliers were electrical manufacturers — they tended to be suppliers of office supplies such as inkjet cartridges or toner for laser printers.
The criminals would place an order for $30,000-worth of supplies and ask to have it shipped to some address that had nothing to do with WESCO. The person at the shipping address would either be an accomplice who would ship the order on to an overseas freight-forwarder, or the shipment would be intercepted when it was delivered to the address and then forwarded.
“Our name was being fraudulently used and we were determined to take aggressive actions to protect WESCO as well as others. We are committed to being a good corporate citizen,” Brailer said. “We started getting calls from companies, saying, ‘We’ve got this order, and we haven’t been selling to you,’ or, ‘This is an unusually large order, or not your location.’”
WESCO never lost any money in the scams, Brailer said, but quickly began working with the United States Secret Service and other law-enforcement authorities to help them track down the criminals. WESCO posted the warning on its site so it could direct suppliers there when they called with questions. “We wanted to facilitate the protection and prevention of loss for our suppliers, to keep them from being fraudulently taken advantage of,” he said.
The level of fraudulent activity has significantly declined over the past year and WESCO is considering taking the web site warning down. “The authorities told us that’s the way these scams work — they’ll hit one scam for awhile until it gets to the point of diminishing returns, then they’ll move on,” Brailer said. “It seems they’ve gone on to other opportunities.”