Research on the Vital Non-Technical Factor in Telecommunications Fraud: Social Engineering

Abstract

Technical factors such as pseudo base station technology, VoIP technology, Caller ID spoofing technologies are usually considered to be the key problems in telecommunications fraud. In this paper, from thousands of telecommunications fraud cases we found that social engineering attack is the vital non-technical factor behind telecommunications fraud. From appeal to authority, appeal to greed and appeal to vanity, and so on, telecommunications fraudsters (also are social engineers) usually exploit human weakness so as to influence the person to take an action that may or may not be in their best interest. And, we found the three main procedures of social engineering attacks in telecommunications fraud. Also, we provided suggestions to prevent social engineering attacks.