Social Engineering Tactics Exposed

robfreeman.com... - This past week I listened to a podcast ( / interview-with-a-socia... ) of a social engineering call by a podcaster named Junseth. The episode was subsequently taken down, but I’m including the original URL is here… You can still find clips of the recording on X (formerly Twitter) if you search for “junseth” and sort by recent or latest. Just a heads up there’s some explicit language in the call.
The call was a recording of a social engineering fraud attempt by a U.S. based a scammer who described himself as "Daniel" and disclosed that he was a teenage minor living in Los Angeles, California. When the scammer calls Junseth to try to scam him out of his bitcoin, the podcaster exposes the fraudster and engages in a half hour recorded conversation with him. The podcast episode was incredible to listen to because of the casual and remorseless tone of the scammer.
The social engineering tactics exposed during the call include the use psychological manipulation and technical deceptions such as spoofing Google addresses (to get into Gmail accounts), phone numbers and create faked “support” websites that look identical to companies’ actual websites.
These methods reminded me of another social engineering scam that was painstakingly described in February 2024 by a personal finance blogger and journalist named Charlotte Cowles for a publication called "The Cut"…
www.thecut.com...
Charlotte was the victim of a very sophisticated social engineering attack that leveraged compromised personally identifiable data to fuel her emotions during a prolonged, multiple person social engineering attack.
The first step was a call from "Amazon Support" to notify her of suspicious activity on accounts she was told were compromised (but that she didn't really have). As she was transferred from person to person, the threat level escalated with incremental levels of pressure put on her to cooperate in helping to bring criminals to justice. Each time Charlotte's scammers provided new instructions to follow, it was always with urgency and under the guise of keeping her and her family “safe”.