The growth of text-based phishing scams hit close to home for Axios last week when several employees got fake text messages claiming to be from company president and co-founder Roy Schwartz.
The big picture: We dug into the recent campaign targeting Axios employees to learn more about how these scams operate — especially as reports about text message scams continue to outpace reports about email scams this year for the first time, per the Federal Trade Commission.
What’s happening: Last Friday, several employees shared screenshots in a company Slack channel of the suspicious texts they had received.
- The messages targeted employees across the country and across departments, and each one was addressed to the specific individual.
- Several employees admitted in the Slack channel that they replied to the first message because it seemed legitimate — but so far, no one appears to have engaged with the scammers beyond that initial reply.
- At least one employee said they received the message twice in the week: One from Roy and another pretending to be CEO and co-founder Jim VandeHei.
- Not everyone received the message — neither I (a new employee) nor my editor (a veteran) did.
How it works: I showed the messages to Chester Wisniewski, a researcher at cybersecurity firm Sophos, and he immediately recognized them.
- The scam, he explains, aims to get people to buy gift cards and send back photos of the cards’ barcodes. That provides scammers with free, hard-to-trace money.
- This scam has…
