![]() Initially the author sent a quick reply mail, but found that email address mismatched Pahwa’s original ID. The subject of the email was a call to assign work, which was unspecified and the sender enquired about the author’s availability during the day. On January 27, the author of this report received an email in her work inbox from a sender who impersonated MediaNama’s founder and Editor Nikhil Pahwa. Since then, we have informed the team about such emails,” says Jain. We recorded almost 7-8 such incidents spanning across seven months. It was not even in the line of reporting. “Since it was during the lockdown, there was no way to verify by meeting people in-person. The email also had the profile picture, which Jain adds, can trick someone into believing that it’s the real profile of the impersonated person. According to Jain, the employee had never even interacted with Thomas and that he “could not think any better” in the moment. One of the employees ended up losing $500 (Rs 40, 757), but was reimbursed by the company later. Several other Twitter users, who took note of Singh’s tweet pointed out their employees have been facing the same issue on emails.Īnand Jain, co-founder of CleverTap, informed MediaNama about the company employees receiving similar mails in the name of their CEO Sunil Thomas during the Covid-19 lockdown. Speaking to MediaNama, Singh confirms that this is the first time they have been receiving such texts on WhatsApp. STAY ON TOP OF TECH POLICY: Our daily newsletter with top stories from MediaNama and around the world, delivered to your inbox before 9 AM. Speaking with MediaNama, Singh said that the scamsters used pictures from his LinkedIn account and the website page to impersonate him on WhatsApp the easiest way to steal pictures of potential targets. On January 26, Singh tweeted out a series of other screenshots. ![]() The WhatsApp message was sent under Singh’s name. The chat between the two then led them to identify what was wrong and the team of 350 members across multiple locations was informed and sensitised about the fake-boss profiles making rounds on their WhatsApp. But, the scammer was smart enough to use the same profile picture and I was replying to the notifications itself initially,” the employee adds. “I had Avlesh’s number and a chat history too, which I should have checked. Reality struck and the employee quickly deleted the undelivered message. Turned out the scammer’s battery had died out and, in the meantime, the employee decided to cross-check with Singh. Something didn’t seem right when the message was not delivered. In order to complete the said task quickly, the employee ended up buying the gift card voucher and sent a screenshot of the card details to the person on the other side. I immediately need your help to get me two Apple gift card vouchers, each of Rs 5000,” read a message received by the employee, who wished to remain anonymous, on the afternoon of January 10. “Hey, are you busy? I am at an event and trying to reach out to the marketing guys, but unable to connect. It can just be about ‘click to win’ calls.” Whereas, phishing does not really require any inducement of that nature. Without that pretense, the person will not be duped into acting the way that they acted. Here, the key is an inducement of you pretending to be someone else. It is impersonation where, because of you telling me you are ‘X’, I am doing this. ![]() “Impersonation relies upon some degree of familiarity with the identity of the impersonated person. ![]() In the latest case, a WebEngage employee almost ended up sending Apple gift card vouchers to a fraudster posing as the co-founder of the company, Avlesh Singh, on WhatsApp.Ībhinav Sekhri, advocate practising in New Delhi, explains that impersonation is a smaller subset of a broader category of phishing attacks, which do not necessarily rely upon the relationship factor between the impersonated person and the target person. Recently, employees of WebEngage and CleverTap were nearly scammed into spending a good amount of money in compliance of their fake boss’ WhatsApp command. After the mayor of Chandigarh, Mumbai police and Adar Poonawalla, founders of WebEngage, CleverTap and MediaNama have appeared on the radar of impersonators on WhatsApp and mails. Few persons would be alert enough to identify at one glance that such texts can also be scam-worthy and that this could be a new technique for duping employees through WhatsApp. ‘Hi, I needed something to be done urgently’, a text message like this from your boss on a busy day can only mean an incoming on-priority work. ![]()
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