LinkedIn boss scams are on the increase.
Police are warning that fraudsters are targeting young professionals through their LinkedIn pages. Workers in one scam known as “bogus boss” get fraudulent emails appearing to be from their company.
The website is being “massively exploited by criminals in terms of being able to scrape information,” said Warwickshire Police.
According to cyber protection officer James Squire, it was one of the fastest-growing frauds the force has seen.
One victim in his twenties told BBC CWR that he lost over £1,000 after replying to false emails and texts from someone he thought was his supervisor.
“I’d started a new job so I was really keen to impress,” he said, when he received the message asking him to purchase vouchers on behalf of the company.
“It’s a really small company and it wasn’t out of the ordinary for him to be in touch with me,” he explained.
“At first they asked me to purchase £300 of vouchers and then once I’d agreed they asked me to buy more and more of them.
“I showed a couple of my colleagues, and they seemed to think it was normal so I did it.”
A voucher went wrong.
He explained it wasn’t until after the purchase had gone through he realised the email address was fake. He said he was unable to obtain a refund from his bank’s fraud department “because they were deemed purchases that I had made.”
“My colleagues and I go through online safety training, but I still don’t know how these people got hold of my work email address and phone number,” he added.
According to PCSO Squire, the “extremely convincing” fraud is one of the most popular strategies used by crooks right now.
The service is “excellent for business,” he says, but it gives crooks access to information that makes the bogus emails appear “more credible and believable.”
“Unfortunately for us, everybody has got an email address and phone number in order to do pretty much anything at the moment so unfortunately criminals are able to exploit that from anywhere in the world.
The criminals are relying on us to be click-happy, be that a link in an email or text message, so take five seconds or five minutes to think what you’re clicking on,” he added.
