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Comment by raw_anon_1111 | Hacker News Reader

I have started new jobs twice once in 2023 and once last year and before my first day on the job I got a text from the CEO of the company asking me to buy gift cards for them and they couldn’t do it themselves because they were in a meeting.

They said the CEO by name and texted my number. Of course it was a scam that had nothing to do with my CEO. I wonder how they got my number?

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I’ve had these, they would have got the CEO from LinkedIn and my number is googleable from having resumes online. Someone is doing this reconnaissance on different companies.

That seems like a lot of work.

LLMs are excellent at automating this work away.

I would imagine that most of the legwork is automated.

Did you confirm it was a scam? Primarily wondering if it's possible that the company itself contracted someone to do phishing test for new employees. I know there are plenty that do email version of this.

I would hope they don’t do that before I start using my personal number.

If someone did fall for it, the potential that your employees would spend real money that they wouldn’t get reimbursed for would definitely piss a lot of people off.

If they did it I would assume they would do it in a way that the employee would need to get some information first (e.g. the amount or type of gift card) before committing to anything. Or directing to buy it from some fake web shop.

Ceo scam is very common. Anytime someone claims to be a ceo verify! CEO is a popular target because they have power and can request weird things of employees who don't know them in normal business.

Yeah, it happened a bunch when I was working for Yahoo… it became a running joke that our CEO was desperate for gift cards

I know. That's why I wondered if some companies had started running training exercises for the phone variants. Personally I have only encountered the email ones previously.

I got these around the same time frame. The funny thing is that the named CEO was for a company I'd left the year prior. I was still in touch with coworkers from that company, and they told me that it wasn't a training exercise by the infosec team. The infosec team had actually warned people about it after hearing about people getting those texts.

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