A retailer in the North has a small chain of stores and back in 2010 a series of seven Western Union transactions supposedly went through one of his PayPoint terminals.

He says he hadn’t wanted Western Union in that particular store because his maintenance company had remote access to the PC, but it was a condition of the installation.

He has no evidence of who was behind the disappearance of more than £10K but he is adamant that it wasn’t the manager, who is still there and who has no contact with anyone in Russia – which is where the money wound up. He believes he was hacked and says: “IP addresses are very easy to mask.”

Of course, he went to the police. “They found that Western Union hadn’t processed one of the transactions (about £1,500) because they thought it looked dodgy.”

He asked if any other retailers had had similar problems. Anyone?