Verizon pros surprised by how much time scammers spend getting to know their victims

Take a look at the spam texts on your phone, and you might see what Verizon experts saw when they were crafting another comprehensive data breach report.

“If it’s anything like ours, it’s chock full of messages “mistakenly” sent to the wrong person, invoices for toll roads in other states or “remote jobs” that are too good to be true,” the Verizon 2025 DBIR Report reads.

This pattern remains among Verizon’s top three observed social engineering patterns starting 2019.

“In our opinion, the really interesting thing about these types of attacks is not simply the scale of them but also the amount of time attackers seem to be dedicating to building familiarity with the victims,” the report reads.

Automatization tools help attackers, naturally, but, as Verizon researchers pointed out, this trend started way before AI was in the picture, so it can’t take all the credit.

Poor grammar is no longer a telltale sign of a scam. Nor are the scammy messages coming from a Nigerian prince.

“Now we even have to be cautious of messages that seem to be coming from our peers, partners or vendors. Some originate from online relationships that are built over a period of months of back and forth via email (or a messaging app) with the occasional video chat thrown in to aid legitimacy,” the report noted.

Another curious report this week came from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). While we talk and talk and talk about ransomware, it turns out that ransomware attacks are just a drop in the ocean compared to the money people lost to investment, business email compromise, and tech support scams, among other things.