According to the U. S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the computer scams aiming at small businesses, cost US$25 million in the third quarter of 2009 to the U. S companies.

The electronic transfer of funds involving fraudulent ways has increased to the loss of about US$120 million in the third quarter of 2009. This estimate was presented by David Nelson (an examination specialist with the FDIC) at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

With the help of different confidential reports from financial institutions, FDIC is able to generate the estimates.

Nelson shared that a victim is usually tricked into visiting a nasty website or downloading a Trojan house program, through which the hackers are able to access their bank account passwords. Automated Clearing House system is used to do the money transfer, which is generally used by the banks to process payments.

Nelson said, "Commercial deposit accounts do not receive the reimbursement protection that consumer accounts have, so a lot of small businesses and nonprofits have suffered some relatively large losses. In the third quarter of
2009, small businesses suffered $25 million in losses due to online ACH and wire transfer fraud".

Nelson also added that hackers more or less target higher-balance accounts and they usually go for small businesses where controls are not that good.