Billboard Insider is running a series on protecting your company from out of home fraud. We’ve talked about check fraud and pig butchering. Today we’ll discuss impersonation scams.
Impersonation scams have been around for a while. Scammers mine a company website or linked in and use the info to pretend to be your boss or an acquaintance. Here’s an impersonation scam Billboard Insider received just yesterday. Kevin Gephart is an out of home sales expert who writes for Billboard Insider but isn’t an employee. Someone purporting to be Kevin Gephart sent this…
This scam was easy to detect because Kevin Gephart isn’t an employee and the email in the header isn’t Kevin’s email. It is pervasive because anyone with an internet connection and a LinkedIn account or AI can search out your business relationships and pretend to be someone close to you.
A few years ago there was an impersonation scam where someone was sending emails to the employees of a public out of home company claiming to be the CEO and asking for money. Other impersonation scams can consist of an email that doesn’t quite look right from someone who claims to be your boss or a business acquaintance asking you to click on an annual review or your most recent paycheck filing or a docusign document. The attachment is malware.
AI is making impersonation scams difficult to detect. The British engineering firm Arup took a $25 million loss in May 2024 on an impersonation scam. A Hong Kong based employee in Arup’s finance department recceived an email supposedly from the company’s UK based CFO, asking the employee to set up a series of wire transfers for a top secret acquisition. Then the employee was invited to a zoom meeting in which the company’s CFO instructed the employee to proceed with the wires while several other company employees at the zoom meeting nodded. The entire meeting was generated by AI deepfakes. The worker initially suspected that something was wrong but went ahead with the wire because he recognized the faces on the zoom call.
How can you protect your OOH company from impersonation scams. (1) Trust your instincts. If it doesn’t sound right it probably isn’t. (2) Verify independently with a face to face meeting or a direct phone call to the person who is asking you to do something out of the ordinary. The Arup scam could have been avoided if the employee had reached out directly via a face to face meeting or phone or email to someone else at the company before sending the wires.
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