Business e-mail compromise (BEC) has emerged as one of the most financially damaging online crimes. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), organizations lost nearly $56 billion across approximately 305,000 incidents between October 2013 and December 2023. Increasingly, gift cards are playing a key role in BEC scams. Understanding how these schemes work can help prevent them from harming your business. Role of gift cards To steal from companies, BEC perpetrators use social engineering and computer intrusion techniques. Their goal is to trick email users into transferring funds to them. Although several BEC variations are active, cybercriminals usually impersonate senior executives and target lower-level employees by asking workers to fulfill what might seem like routine requests. These include sending money via wire or writing a check. In...
