I saw something disturbing this morning.
One of my clients showed me an email. They use Gmail for their emails (on their own domain) and download them locally.
The email officially came from their company president, giving the purchasing department orders to immediately pay an invoice of around €20,000 to a new supplier in the UK. It included all the details and had the invoice attached as a PDF.

The worrying part is that the style and tone of the writing were exactly like their president's. However, the sender's address, while using the correct name, was a generic Gmail account. This immediately raised a red flag for the purchasing department, and they didn't fall for it. It was also easy for them to check because the president was in their office at that very moment.

Looking at the sender's address, it would have been simple for anyone to figure out what was happening, but many people don't.
The accuracy with which they (likely using an LLM) recreated the president's writing style is truly concerning.

#Scam#Spam#FakeSender

@gabe_saltar it does. I felt stupid. Then I was angry, because it wasn't easy to spot. They stole the login credentials of a legit shop and changed the IBAN. PayPal or other similar tools weren't available. It came out that more than 15 people were scammed, all around Europe. We got in touch with one another and we all went to the police but they couldn't find the money. There's been some money transfer from the original country (Germany) to another, non European country and then...everything lost.

@stefano WOW! In my case the person pretended to be my boss, and asked me to send him money in for apple gift cards... It sounded suspicious as hell, but I felt for it because I was new in the company. It was second week at the job and I didn't know anyone in the company well enough to make the correct judgement call.

I found the whole thing to be embarrassing because my major is in Cyber Security. To say I felt stupid, would be understatement of the year

😬

1 more replies (not shown)

@stefano I'm frustrated because a solution to this problem exists for decades - its name is . Also it has it's disadvantages, problems and is of course not bullet proof, I wonder why nobody was able to design a GUI that is usable for most users with a few hours of training. You only need to understand 5 % of PGP to be able to use it.

I think convenience and lack of interest (until it's too late) are the main obstacles.