Cyber Insurance Sub-Limits on Wire Transfer Fraud Coverage

Just to clarify – social engineering, sometimes it’s called funds transfer fraud. In layman’s terms, wire fraud is used often to describe it.

I call it the 21st century con. It’s a 21st century digital con. It’s when somebody walks up to you and says, “hi, let’s do this!” But they’re doing it in a digital way … and who gets “conned” is your employee.

So your employee (or even a vendor or partner that you work with) gets tricked into wiring the funds to a criminal’s account. And so it stems from a of either a phishing email or some kind of fraudulent instruction. And, and just like you said, because there’s been such a dramatic rise in the frequency and size of social engineering claims, insurance companies have responded by implementing what we call sublimits.

So I think that’s what you’re referring to when you say, “how do they separate it?” So these sublimates are a way that the insurance carrier mitigates their loss in the event of a claim. So you may have a $5 million cyber policy. But it, when you look into it, it only covers $100,000 for wire fraud due to social engineering. And that’s all the coverage you have for the entire year.

For a lot of firms that’s just a drop in the bucket depending on the amount of money that they’re wiring every year. So in most cases, the maximum yearly limit on the sublimit for social engineering is 250,000. So what’s the solution? … First, you should just be aware of what your policy’s limit is. And then we can max out the social engineering limit on your cyber policy and if you need more, which is common, we can go out and get a separate crime policy.

So on the cyber insurance policy, we have a social engineering limit of 250,000 and with the crime policy, we can do the same and they also supplement that on a crime policy. So we can max it out to let’s say 250,000 for social engineering on that as well. So combined, we’re, we’re essentially stacking the coverage uh for a total of say $500,000 in this case. And there are many benefits to having a separate crime policy. In addition to a cyber, social engineering, just being one of them

We’d be happy to review your insurance coverage options with you! Give us a call at 516-419-5050 or visit https://jpins.com.