Hackers stole $2.3 million from President Trump re-election funds in Wisconsin

Last week, hackers stole $2.3 million from President Trump re-election funds in Wisconsin. The cyber hackers created fake invoices to look like vendors that the Wisconsin Republican Party worked with, the state’s Republican Party said on Thursday.

According to a report from Associated Press, who first broke the news, the Wisconsin GOP disclosed in a statement that hackers targeted and stole from the organization’s Trump re-election funds in the battleground state, with less than a week until Election Day.

“Cybercriminals, using a sophisticated phishing attack, stole funds intended for the re-election of President Trump, altered invoices and committed wire fraud,” Wisconsin GOP chairman Andrew Hitt said in a statement. “These criminals exhibited a level of familiarity with state party operations at the end of the campaign to commit this crime.”

The hack is a Business Email Compromise scheme, a common scam where hackers pose as business partners for an organization and request payments on their behalf. Google and Facebook lost more than $100 million in a scheme from 2013 to 2015 to a Lithuanian man posing as a computer hardware company.

Wisconsin’s Republican Party said it first noticed it was the victim of a cyberattack on Oct. 22, and notified the FBI on Oct. 23. The organization said it doesn’t believe that hackers stole any data in the process. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.