The world’s largest oil producer Saudi Aramco on Sunday said that an attempted fraud that targeted its trading unit Aramco Trading and India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) had been foiled.
The Indian Express newspaper had last week reported that fraudsters last month duplicated the e-mail address of an ONGC employee by just changing the order of ‘ongc’ to ‘ognc’ in the domain name.
The fraudsters, posing as ONGC representatives, then established communication with Saudi Aramco to which they had delivered naptha worth more than $30mn earlier and were awaiting payment.
The fraudsters asked Aramco to transfer the money to their Bangkok-based bank account instead of their State Bank of India (SBI) account, thereby defrauding them of the large sum.
However, in a brief statement to Reuters, Aramco said: “The attempted fraud has been foiled and did not have any financial impact on either of the two companies or on trading relations between them.”
