Social engineering and the crypto scam

This is a very interesting attack; in fact, the attack is so clever that even some experts have fallen for this well-crafted attack.

The attack is simple, yet brilliant. Here, the attacker sends a message to the victim, pretending it was sent by mistake as the intended recipient should be another person.

While this attack is not exclusively done via WhatsApp, the fact that WhatsApp is used by millions around the world as the main form of communication makes this platform one of the most commonly used for this attack. However, there is evidence of attackers using other social media platforms such as Twitter and even dating sites to execute this scam.

Now, to illustrate this attack, let’s look at the following figure, which shows how the attacker engages the victim:

Figure 2.11 – Wrong message scam

Here, the attack is aimed at one of the oldest weaknesses in humans: greed. The message (which seems...