Social Engineering
It’s not a new form of applied science, rather a new name for an old profession - conning people out of their hard earned money. From hard experience, understanding scams is part of careful financial planning — both my wife and I were both taken at a young age. The lastest scams are ingenious in their use of modern technology.
These scammers range from the Harvard MBAs who ran Enron to teenagers sitting in cybercafes in developing countries. All of these grifters have one common tool: getting your trust. Email has turned out to be a nearly ideal way to do both since it is very easy to forge email.
The typical way an email scam plays out is that someone sends you email claiming to be who they aren’t, such as your bank or a foreign dignitary. The fake bank email, which can look very real, asks for private information that the criminals then use to steal your money or identity.
The fake foreign dignitary runs a more subtle confidence game: they ask you to send them a small amount of money to help transfer a huge amount of money into the US, of which they will give you a substantial cut. Of course, the huge amount of money never materializes. A more recent variant of this ploy is to actually deliver a large cashier’s check or money order to you that you then deposit in your bank account. The dignitary then asks you to send a small amount of money back, which you do. A few days later you and your bank discover that the cashier’s check or money order is forged and you are out the money you sent.
The important point to remember is that email, web sites, and checks all can be forged — trust no one and verify everything that has to do with money. In fact email and and web browsers are designed not to check that the sender or web site is who they say they are. This is because both technologies originated with groups of scientists who knew each other personally. Designing trust into the software would have taken a great deal of work and they had no reason to do so.
