Scams use deception to steal money, credentials, or sensitive data, making them a cybersecurity risk for individuals and organizations.
Search across headline titles and summaries.
Background for this topic.
Scams are deceptive schemes intended to make people surrender money, credentials, sensitive information, or access. In information security, they commonly use phishing messages, impersonation, fraudulent websites, business-email compromise, fake technical support, or malicious attachments. Their defining feature is manipulation: the attacker creates a credible pretext and pressures the target to act before verifying the request.
Security teams should treat scams as an attack surface spanning email, messaging, telephone calls, social media, and payment workflows. Material risks include account takeover through stolen credentials, unauthorized payments, disclosure of personal or company data, and malware execution from deceptive content. Useful controls include phishing-resistant authentication, secure payment-change procedures with independent verification, filtering and domain protections, user training focused on reporting, and rapid review of suspicious messages or transactions. Incident handling may require revoking sessions, resetting credentials, contacting financial institutions, preserving evidence, and notifying affected parties where applicable.
The Middle East and Africa region saw a whopping 135% increase in scams over the past year, with finance, telecommunications, and logistics the most-targeted sectors.
Social media and messaging apps are main conduit
A consumer finance journalist and television personality took to Twitter to warn his followers about advertisements using his name and face to scam victims.
Money-saving expert has sued Meta before over fake ads