Recent trends in Social Engineering Scams and Case study of Gift Card Scam

Abstract: Social engineering scams (SES) has been existed since the adoption of the telecommunications by humankind. An earlier version of the scams include leveraging premium phone service to charge the consumers and service providers but not limited to. There are variety of techniques being considered to scam the people due to the advancements in digital data access capabilities and Internet technology. A lot of research has been done to identify the scammer methodologies and characteristics of the scams. However, the scammers finding new ways to lure the consumers and stealing their financial assets. An example would be a recent circumstance of Covid-19 unemployment, which was used as a weapon to scam the US citizens. These scams will not be stopping here, and will keep appearing with new social engineering strategies in the near future. So, to better prepare these kind of scams in ever-changing world, we describe the recent trends of various social engineering scams targeting the innocent people all over the world, who oversight the consequences of scams,and also give detailed description of recent social engineering scams including Covid scams. The social engineering scan threat model architecture is also proposed to map various scams. In addition, we discuss the case study of real-time gift card scam targeting various enterprise organization customers to steal their money and put the organization reputation in stake. We also provide recommendations to internet users for not falling a victim of social engineering scams. In the end, we provide insights on how to prepare/respond to the social engineering scams by following the security incident detection and response life cycle in enterprises