Social engineering scams occur when fraudsters trick their victims into trusting them enough to send either money or personal information. When the victim sends money, it is known as authorized push payment (APP) fraud. Since it can take many forms, each difficult to stop, this fraud type is one of the more troubling types — and it’s on the rise.
For context, there were a record 1,025,968 phishing attacks globally during the first quarter of 2022, the first time the number of phishing incidents surpassed 1 million in a single quarter. It is not just phishing attacks that are up, either. A survey of business executives throughout the Americas found that 44% of respondents experienced a rise in phishing, while 33% experienced a rise in scamming and 17% experienced an increase in criminals using social engineering scams to penetrate company networks.