Every year, the Internet Crime Complaint Center, also known as IC3, publishes an annual report looking at the different types of internet-based crimes reported to the FBI. Over the last year, victims around the globe lost $2.71 billion to all types of cybercrime, which includes lottery scams, hacktivism, gambling fraud, malware, ransomware attacks, and tech support fraud, among others.

Historically, business email compromise (BEC) threat actors have used wire transfers as a means to steal money from businesses. Impersonating a trusted contact, usually a company executive, a scammer requests that a fictitious vendor get paid by sending money to a bank account controlled by the scammer or an associate.

It’s like clockwork. Every year around tax time security vendors (even us!) push out warnings about W-2 forms being stolen at tax time, and every year dozens of organizations disclose that someone inside of their organization fell victim to a BEC scam where actors were asking for W-2 information.

Scammers know that impersonating a trusted government agency is an extremely effective way to trick or scare victims into handing over money, personal data, or sensitive information. In many cases, it’s all too easy for cybercriminals to use the agency’s own domains to send authentic-looking phishing emails to constituents and contractors. That’s why the Department of Homeland Security announced BOD 18-01 requiring all federal agencies to implement DMARC email authentication by October 2018.

The April 15th deadline to file taxes in the United States is almost here, which means Tax Day phishing operations are in high gear. Impersonating the IRS is a year-round favorite tactic for cybercriminals. In fact, the IRS was the third most-impersonated brand in Q4 2018. But with the April 15th deadline on the horizon, criminals know that now is the perfect time to exploit anxiety, distraction, and time pressure to snare more victims.

When it comes to sharing threat intelligence with one another, organizations tend to play the game differently. Some prefer to play the “secret squirrel game,” where attribution is something so sacred that names of actors can only be whispered behind closed doors. In other cases, data is bought on the dark underbellies of the Internet and then sold back to organizations as threat intelligence. For others, like the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division, information is shared amongst trusted individuals who can use it to stop cybercrime and bring criminals to justice.

One of the trends that has been slowly creeping up across the BEC threat landscape is that actors are using other techniques in order to get money outside of an organization.

We all know that phishing attacks came fast and furious. Timed and tailored for maximum effect, these malicious email messages exploit the cruelest of social engineering tactics, preying on customer anxieties, especially in the aftermath of major crises.

Business email compromise (BEC) is a term that encompasses a variety of techniques and tactics that cybercriminals leverage to obtain money or data via identity deception. Despite the evolution and repurposing of this suite of associated tactics, one constant has remained throughout—the correspondence between scammer and victim is done, almost without exception, over email.

With the 2019 tax season reaching full throttle, a volatile mix of conditions could fuel an unprecedented barrage of W-2 phishing scams through mid-April this year. For the businesses and employees who fall victim, the results can be disastrous.

W-2s, of course, are the IRS documents that United States businesses provide employees after the end of each year, documenting the employee's earnings, tax withholding, Social Security number, and address. The employee must include the information from the W-2 on their income tax returns.