First Orion Reports Scam Callers Now Leveraging Data Breaches in New “Enterprise Spoofing” Strategy

July 9, 2019

Major companies have been victimized in recent years by massive data breaches that exposed billions of customers’ personal identifiable information. Fraudsters are now using this stolen personal data to masquerade as trusted companies in a new, more effective scam strategy called Enterprise Spoofing. In a 2018 Scam Report, First Orion reported that nearly half of all mobile calls would be scam in 2019, and while volume remains high--still trending to over 40% on the year--it turns out that scammers are now shifting to a ’quality over quantity’ approach for the first time using more sophisticated techniques than ever.

To examine this issue in-depth, First Orion analyzed over 40 billion calls made to customers in 2019 (year to date) and commissioned a blind study of 5,000 mobile phone subscribers in the United States who had spoken to scam callers to create the second annual Scam Report for 2019.