‘Boss Scams’ Target New Employees With Social Engineering

A wave of graduates entering the job market could present new targets for scammers.

As the Financial Times (FT) reported Sunday (Sept. 14), new hires can often fall prey to “boss scams,” a variation of “spear-phishing” in which fraudsters pretend to be a supervisor, seeking help in purchasing gift cards for employees or customers. The victim passes the voucher onto the scammer, who then sells it on the dark web at a discount.

“A new boss is someone that we don’t question. We don’t want to be seen rocking the boat,” Elisabeth Carter, criminologist at Kingston University and host of BBC Radio 4’s “Scam Secrets” podcast, told the FT, adding that this is happening as the job market is more competitive than it has been in years.

“When you do finally land a role, you’re … so grateful … you want to make a good impression. You want to act quickly,” Carter said.

She argued that the boss scam taps into workers’ insecurities when starting a new job: They haven’t formed a trusted network, and they’re eager to please.

“When you’re asked to do a task [you’ll say], ‘Yes I’ll do it,’ no matter what it is,” Carter said.

Scammers are able to target these workers, the report said, using a type of social engineering scam that involves link analysis, or scraping data from social media platforms to learn the human relationships or connections inside an organization. 

In particular, they focus on job announcements on sites like LinkedIn, said Jason Hogg, executive chair of Cypfer, a cybersecurity specialist.

“With the proliferation of large language models [fraudsters can] emulate human behavior, look up people’s profiles and connections and then behind the scenes be able to manipulate those connections and draw a social graph out,” Hogg said.

Social engineering has become “one of the most dangerous” fraud techniques as it underpins so many other scams, Dustin White, vice president of risk products and solutions at Visa DPS, said in an interview with PYMNTS last week.

Romance scams, scams targeting parents with fake emergency calls from their children, and psychological manipulation all offer fraudsters entry points into accounts.

Synthetic identities, woven together from fragments of real and fake information, heighten the damage, causing losses “by orders of magnitude compared to traditional transactional fraud,” White told PYMNTS. 

He added that account takeovers are also difficult to stop after criminals hold all the keys to a customer’s profile. Making matters worse: Fraudsters excel at pooling resources.

“Fraudsters democratize intelligence better than anybody,” White said. “And financial institutions often don’t.”

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