Cyber attacks are a daily occurance and what people are realising is how pervasive these attacks are in cuasing massive disruption to their lives and their finances. There are comedy movies about identity theft and fraud with a well known one that shows how easy and effective impersonation is in perpetuating fraud. The movie in question is Catch Me If You Can and portrays how Leonardo De Caprio's character became a fraudster due to family financial issues. It was a progressive escalation where he went from a single fraud incident to living a luxurious lifestyle defrauding companies of people's salaries and the companies themselves.

What this failed to address is the psychological effect that fraud and identity theft has on a person. It causes dramatic hardship wich affects people's credit scores and can have long term impact on financial well being and can in cases cause unintented debt to the person who was never involved in the fraud in the first place. Proving the fraud is becoming more complex due to the amount of identity theft and how easy it is to steal people's information or collate it from data which companies loose due to data breaches or even data loss due to poor IT security practice. 

Fraudsters use this information and do their own research if they decide to be more targeted. In a lot of cases low level extortion fraud can happen easily enough through generic emails sent en masse to huge email lists which have been collected over the years by online criminals. Once a person has been targeted invariably they will be retargeted as it is easier to do this than someone who has never paid before. In this case a marketing principle of targeting the same "customer" is used. 

There are many ways that people are being targeted on a daily basis but there is just one end result - your money or your companies money.

Fraudsters do not care what your personal or company situation is and will target anyone from banks to hopsitals, charities and any government organisation. No one is secure and even crypto currencies are targeted. They will litereally steal the last penny from your hand while you struggle to keep your head above water and this has been proven during the pandemic where hospitals where targeted by ransomware groups.

A clear example recently was a Instagram "influencer" called Hushpuppi who was living a wealthy lifestyle in Dubai but was arrested and now faces 20 years in jail for multiple cases of fraud spanning decades and fraud exceeding millions of dollars. What was not reported was the devastating effect it had on the companies and the personal cost to people. 

Become more secure in your cyber habits or become aware of the risks posed to your or your businesses financial well being by integrating principles of cyber security in your daily life.