The holidays are when people unknowingly let their guard down, and cybercriminals know it. They take advantage of people at home who are in a good mood, excitedly awaiting packages that are gifts for family or friends; and they also know employee counts are low as the staff takes vacation time and someone not used to a certain role might be covering for another employee. It is a holiday recipe for potential disaster.
See: https://redskyalliance.org/xindustry/holiday-2021-tip-to-stay-safe-1
The FBI, reported last year that Americans experienced $6.9 billion in losses from holiday scams, including $337 million from online shopping and non-delivery scams alone. FedEx and other parcel delivery companies deal not only with external issues with customers affected by bad actors trying to scam package recipients, but also attacks on internal issues with hackers claiming to be customers looking for retribution for a failed package delivery.
We ask external customers to send to abuse@fedex.com," stated a FedEx spokesman. "If you ever get one of those, we have an entire setup where they do takedowns of those malicious characters that are sending out those emails. And they do tend to ramp them up at Christmas time, knowing darn good and well that you have ordered all these gifts. "Internally, they'll tend to attack our customer, internal team members, by going after them saying they're a customer that has lost something, for example."
Investigators note that a lot of fraud investigations involve following the money, with the main motivator being financial gain for cybercriminals, and it is why reporting incidents, no matter if it is thousands of dollars are a few hundred or less, is important.
Statistics show that within 24 hours of a wire transfer, especially overseas, being reported to law enforcement, we can recover all or a portion of the money somewhere in the neighborhood of 55% or 56% of the time; after 72 hours, it is about 1%, “ per FedEx.
Red Sky Alliance is a Cyber Threat Analysis and Intelligence Service organization. For questions, comments, or assistance, please get in touch with the office directly at 1-844-492-7225, or feedback@wapacklabs.com
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