BARTON COUNTY -Officials won’t know until later whether they will be able to recover $48,600 that was wired to a Georgia Bank by Barton County Treasurer Kevin Wondra.

It appears he fell for one of the latest email scams.

Wondra wired the money after receiving an email that he thought was from Barton County Administrator Richard Boeckman, an email that Boeckman says did not come from his office.

Boeckman says that besides not following protocol, there were many red flags that should have let the Treasurer know that something was not right.

“I would not have had the authority to authorize this amount of money,” said Boeckman. “For this amount, it would have gone to the commissioners, been approved as an agenda item, and been encumbered. Obviously nobody checked,” he said.

“Also nobody asked what account to pay this from. No invoice, the money wasn’t encumbered, no agenda item, a lot of reasons why this should have caused questions to be asked.”

After officials became aware of the scam, Boeckman says they immediately took steps to make sure that other county, general fund money was not at risk.

Boeckman said Thursday morning that he remained cautiously optimistic that the county will be able to get their money back since there were other counties that received the same type of email. Because of that there is a chance that the Georgia bank put a fraud hold on the transaction but that will not be known until later.