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

@stefano That's only dangerous if a potential victim has 20k spare change laying around

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

@ricardo unfortunately, amounts like those are in their budgets, so they could pay them

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

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

@stefano All jokes aside, wouldn’t a proper accounting department question an unscheduled or unbudgeted expense just because the invoice says "pay now", specially without any warning?

@stefano

I wonder how the scammers get samples of the president's emails to use?

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

@ricardo this one doesn't - but another I know did it. And lost 18000 euros.
And they refused a new server because "hey, 1800 euros are too much for a refurbished Dell server"

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

@stefano

@stefano I’ve heard that they also do this through phone call, using AI mimicking voices.

@joel

I'd considered making a mini CLI-oriented podcast but this concern was part of why I have very little audio of my voice online.

@stefano

@gumnos @stefano I don’t know how many samples would be required to initialize the "you" model. But given that a single photo can be used to achieve not that bad deepfake, this could be only a few minutes

@joel @gumnos Someone told me they use the spam calls (or the unwanted calls) to train models with your voice, if needed.

@stefano This is true. Quite popular fraud scheme in my country (and actually post-Soviet space). So they collect enough samples of your voice to train AI, and then call your relatives asking to transfer money somewhere ASAP. That's one of the schemes.

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

@stefano As embarrassing as it may be, I once was scammed by someone pretending to be the owner of the company where I worked. I lost approximately $1,000

However, I did learn my lesson and checking the email address of any suspicious email is the first thing I do now