The grocery store manager was telling us how scammers have names of all higher ups at her and nearby stores and their schedules. So they know when to call, and what names to mention. All extremely professional sounding over the phone.

except that the scammer was another attendee with a drug problem? before you yell at me, this actually happened to me, contacted via a trusted, long-term social club, and one of the wives (unknown to me) apparently had a full-on painkiller addiction and when it is time, they do anything.. even as far as using the phone list from the trusted social group to arrange for (thinly disguised) payment card purchases "now"

They usually look at your website and find some names - if you have buy-in you can create a fake president or CEO to catch many of these.

A new secretary at a company I consult for received an email saying she needed to buy gift cards for an employee. Our best guess is scammers look for people posting about their new administrative assistant jobs on LinkedIn, etc....

Many companies leak tons of information on their website; look up the CEO/President's name, find someone on Linked-in that is a new hire, guess their email based on whatever format the company uses (first.last@company, etc) and send a decent looking email or call.

It's pretty darn advanced, and can extend to texts, etc. If you don't know 'how your president talks' you can easily be bamboozled (we cover it in onboarding now, and have identified people they can always go to with questions).

From Hong Kong, and I rarely even pick up phone calls from unnamed sources anymore