It feels like every day there is some new email scam making the rounds. It’s difficult to keep up. The latest scam going around is the Impersonation Scam. While this isn’t technically a new scam, there has been a major uptick in scam attempts in the past few weeks. Scammers are creating fake gmail accounts (or using other hacked email systems) to create accounts that look like the owners of a company. They then use these fake email accounts to target the accounting department of the company.
These emails are specifically targeting companies and the scammers are scraping information from company websites and possibly even calling the company to determine who to target in the accounting department.
The scammers are asking for iTunes gift cards and have sent the email from a very generic gmail account. To the recipient, the email looks like it was a real request from the owner of this company.
Long term, there are very few technical ways to combat this scam. It is possible to filter out these emails, but there would be a risk of filtering out the legitimate private email address of the user being impersonated. The best prevention for this scam is vigilance and education.
These emails are specifically targeting companies and the scammers are scraping information from company websites and possibly even calling the company to determine who to target in the accounting department.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.
