We all like to think that we are safe from fraud. We laugh at emails from an unknown sender offering us £2 million in exchange for our bank details. But the game has changed and the scammers have developed new, terrible tactics. They take an individual approach and search the internet for all the details they can find about us.

Scammers are getting so skilled that even cybersecurity experts are on their way.

One of us (Oliver Buckley) remembers receiving an email from his university’s vice-chancellor in 2018.

“This is it” I thought. Finally, people at the highest level know me. However, something went wrong. Why was the Vice-Chancellor using his Gmail address? I asked how I could meet. I needed to buy him a £800 worth of iTunes gift card for me and all I had to do was scratch the back and send the code to him. Not wanting to disappoint her, I offered to stop by her secretary’s office and give her a £5 note from my wallet. But I didn’t get any response from him.”

The infamous “Prince of Nigeria” emails are becoming obsolete. Instead, scammers scour social media, especially business-related ones like LinkedIn, to target people with personalized messages. The strength of a relationship between two people can be measured by checking the posts and comments they make to each other. In the first quarter of 2022, LinkedIn accounted for 52% of all phishing scams worldwide.

human tendencies

Psychologists who study obedience to authority know that we are more likely to respond to requests from people higher up in our social and professional hierarchy. And scammers know this too.

Scammers don’t need to spend a lot of time researching corporate structures. “I’m at a conference and my phone is dead. Can you ask XXX to send me the XXX report?” triggers a typical scam message.

Data from Google Safe Browsing shows that there are almost 75 times more phishing sites than malware sites on the Internet. Almost 20% of all employees are likely to click on a link in a phishing email, and an astonishing 68% of them continue to enter their credentials on the phishing website.

Globally, email spam costs businesses approximately $20 billion (£17 billion) each year. Research by business consultant and tax auditor BDO found that six out of ten medium-sized businesses in the UK fell victim to fraud in 2020, with an average loss of £245,000. Source