But remember, that's what professional “phishers” do - they gather enough information to convince you they are someone they’re not. The scammer might sound just like your boss, and may even know details about you or your company that you’d never expect a fraudster to know. Source: New York Attorney General's Office Real example of a 2021 text message from a fake employer to an employee, seeking Target gift cards. Source: The Ohio State University Cybersecurity Examples of a boss gift card scam:Īn example of an email from a fake supervisor's “personal” account to an employee.
But once someone hands over a gift card or PIN number, the money will be gone and the business - or even worse, the employee - will be on the hook. They might even ask the employee to foot the bill, and promise to pay it back later. Maybe the scammer needs a gift card to pay for an upcoming “office party.” Maybe it’s to support a “charity” of some sort. STEP 3 - The scammer sends the request to a lower employee, asking to buy gift cards for a random reason and send the gift card numbers or PINs back via email or text. Finally, they could spoof a phone number from your area code and send a text message instead. STEP 2 - The scammer hacks into the supervisor's business account, or spoofs a similar email domain that's hard to notice (for example becomes Or, they could create a fake email account through GMail, Yahoo or another service, and make an excuse for sending something from their “personal” email. They'll also search for job titles, telephone numbers and other important information about the company, to help disguise their request. STEP 1 - The scammer scours the Internet for names and emails of a company's high-ranking supervisors. What is a fake boss scam?Ī fake boss scam is a text or email scam in which fraudsters pretend to be a supervisor and request gift cards (or some other payment) to be sent to them, for a variety of made-up reasons. In this article, I'll talk about the fake boss gift card scam, along with ways you and your business can protect yourself. companies billions of dollars, and this particular version could be on the rise as so many employees continue to work remotely. The FTC is warning people about a type of “boss scam” where scammers trick employees into buying gift cards by pretending to be their supervisor. You would never ignore a message from your boss, right? That’s exactly what scammers are counting on.
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