Hello Colleagues, 

We recently learned that several members of the public who applied for permits from our department received fraudulent invoices from third parties claiming to be from our County. This did not involve any breach of County information systems. Rather, the perpetrators of the fraud created fake invoices for County services using publicly available information such as property addresses and project descriptions drawn from the County website. Some of the information was obtained from the public-facing web portal for our online permitting system, while other information appears to have been obtained from public meeting agendas, such as the County Planning Commission agenda. The perpetrators directed recipients of the fraudulent invoices to send them payments via wire transfer.

In response to these incidents, we have taken various preventive actions, such as placing warnings on the County website, decreasing the amount of project information we make available to the public on our permitting system website and reporting the incidents to law enforcement. 

I would like other local jurisdictions to be aware of our experience so they can take preventive measures they deem appropriate to reduce the likelihood of such incidents. I am also interested to know if other jurisdictions have experienced similar incidents of fraud, and if so, how they responded. We hope that sharing this information within the local government community can reduce the likelihood of such incidents occurring in the future and help us all respond as best we can when such incidents do occur. Please reply to let me know if your jurisdiction has experienced anything similar to this and how you responded. Thank you.

Published Thursday, November 13, 2025