We had an incident at work where ‘the boss’ emailed an admin team member and asked them to use my company credit card to purchase some supermarket vouchers for the team as a gif – £1k worth.
The place I used to work at would routinely get emails from "the boss" asking for this urgent invoice to be paid.
We had a good IT system and a load of protocols in place (#1 being that the actual boss would *never* email requests like that) and they all got blocked but it was whack-a-mole. You'd block a spammer over here and a fraudster would pop up over there. Constant battle.
The finance team was very close knit and very good as well, that really helped. But I can see how in a bigger organisation with higher pressures, maybe new staff members etc that something like that could easily get through.
My dad fell for that text scam at the weekend, he even queried which daughter, the response was guess, so he did ?
Both my brother and I introduce ourselves as "second favourite son" when we call the parents on their landline. Maybe we should stop doing that.
We old do need to be extremely savvy about the scammers. I would like to think that I am at the top of my game on cyber stuff.
I had trouble with my bank card not being accepted, couldn't get through to said bank, so left a message on the FB site. And then got a reply...
After I had sent some details of my card, but not the important one, I realised what was happening. The site was a complete clone - the only way of telling any difference was the no of likes (which were few) and the quality of English being used.
I complained to FB - but I am not sure if the ever closed the site down.
My MIL got caught last year.
Text message from ‘nhs’
With a link to pay for her covid test.
She’d had a test a couple of days before, so clicked on it.
Very soon, a call from ‘the bank’ telling her that scammers were trying to apply for. 13k loan and she needs to move her funds to secure the account.
The actual bank blocked the payment though.
She’s not stupid, far from it in fact, but she still got caught.
Do not underestimate these people, they’re persistent and have no qualms about screwing anybody over.
So, if you want to add to a list of 'probable' scams to warn your parents about- the mobile phone company ringing up to say you've a tasty discount on the monthly cost of your sim card and they just need you to tell them the four/six digit number they are just about to send to you. (That code obviously being the validation code to get into your account when 'you' (ie them) forget your password etc.)
