Wired magazine has run a story on a phishing scam in Europe, New Zealand and Japan that resulted in the loss of 250,000 carbon credit permits worth $4 million from six companies.

The phishing emails spoofed the German Emissions Trading Authority and said that the victim companies needed to re-register their accounts with the authority. When victims entered their information on a fraudulent web page from the link in the phishing emails the scammers accessed their accounts, transferred emissions credits to accounts they controlled then sold them. The amount the scammers made hasn’t been disclosed.

Wired cited information from the BBC and the German newspaper Der Spiegel.

Story here.