Today one of our employees got scammed, and they used my name to do it. I’m heartbroken for her, and feel so violated personally even though I had no part of it.
Apparently the scam of impersonating “the boss” and asking employees to buy gift cards is a thing. I had not heard of it until today, and obviously she had not either. She received a text that said something along the lines of “I’m in a presentation and can’t get away, but I need you to buy some Apple gift cards”. It finished with “Kindly, Matt Singley”. Of course looking back on it she knows it was a scam, but I can understand why this is so effective and so widespread.
The shitty thing is, there isn’t really any recourse to be had. Apple claims that they cannot track the gift card use, which I find almost insultingly impossible. It’s being used in their ecosystem, somebody within the company would be able to trace it. I don’t think it’s that they can’t, I think it is that they won’t. Obviously there is nothing I can do about that, though. Her bank won’t reverse the charges, because they say it’s not fraud…she actually used her card to buy them, and since it was her, they say “so sorry”.
I looked into this a little more, and it’s so common it’s alarming. Using public information, most likely from LinkedIn, the scammers find people identified with the company, search for publicly available contact info (such as a mobile phone or email), then hit them up. I’m sure it’s a numbers game…it doesn’t always work, but clearly it does enough that it warrants a lot of news coverage about it.
It’s just so disgusting. I have nothing else to say about it, other than the scammers are garbage humans. A big middle finger to all of them (the attached picture is from about a year ago, I sent it to somebody that was trying to scam me out of giving up my passcode to log into gmail).
