The attackers often pose as the CEO, CFO, or another high-ranking individual within a company. In these scams, fraudsters craft urgent, seemingly legitimate requests that prey on authority, urgency, and fear of noncompliance.
While each CEO scam has its own unique intricacies, these attacks tend to broadly follow six key steps:
The attacker begins by mapping the organization’s structure. LinkedIn profiles, press releases, and investor reports offer a roadmap of who controls the purse strings and who executes payment requests. Low-cost tools like Hunter.io or Apollo.io can scrape verified emails from public sources, while criminal marketplaces like the dark web can provide access to billions of breached credentials or internal documents.
Next, fraudsters select their impersonation method. The sophistication and danger of this step vary:
Basic
A Gmail or ProtonMail address mimicking the CEO’s name (e.g., john.doe.ceo@gmail.com). This kind of scam relies on visual similarity, a rushed glance, or perhaps a mobile interface that hides the full email address.
Advanced
The most dangerous form of the CEO scam involves full access to a real executive’s inbox, typically the CEO, CFO, or controller. Once inside, attackers send emails directly from the legitimate account.
These compromises usually begin with:
After gaining access, attackers observe silently: reading emails, downloading invoices, and setting hidden rules, waiting for the ideal moment, such as a major transaction or urgent payment.
When they strike, it looks legitimate. They may reply within real threads, alter payment details in attachments, or message the finance team, all from a verified executive account, often evading detection until it’s too late.
Attackers often look for specific company moments of vulnerability, like M&A activity, funding rounds, or leadership transitions, where urgency is expected. Acquisitions, in particular, are a goldmine: they often involve large transfers, third-party involvement, and a veil of secrecy that can inhibit verification.
If no major company changes are on the horizon, fraudsters can still recognize ideal times to strike, like just before monthly payrolls get processed, holiday periods, capital expenses, or just after a senior leader boards an international flight. The less time the recipient has to think, the more likely the scam will succeed.
At this stage, the infrastructure for the CEO scam is put in place:
These setups are often distributed across jurisdictions to frustrate recovery efforts and obscure criminal liability.
The scammer strikes with urgency and authority. The request might arrive as an email with “CONFIDENTIAL” in the subject line, a WhatsApp message marked “urgent,” or even a voice call using cloned audio snippets.
In high-level cases, attackers:
The goal is to create just enough pressure and familiarity that no one questions the legitimacy of requests.
Once funds or goods are obtained, speed is paramount.
From the fraudsters’ perspectives, the aim here is that the CEO scam operation vanishes into the ether. The most accomplished scams leave behind little forensic trail and a deeply embarrassed finance team.
Here’s an analysis of CEO scams across four critical dimensions using a 0–10 scale (0 = very low, 10 = very high)
The setup cost of a CEO scam varies significantly depending on the attacker’s level of sophistication:
Low-end tactics involve nothing more than a free Gmail address, a LinkedIn profile for research, and clever phrasing. This type of spoofing scam can be launched with close to zero cost.
Mid-tier setups might include domain spoofing, exploiting misconfigured SPF records, or renting SMS gateways or VoIP services to impersonate executives via phone.
High-end operations, especially those involving physical goods fraud or full account compromise, demand more serious investment. Info-stealer malware may cost around €3,000, while logistics for goods-based scams (mules, warehouses, shipping companies) easily push operational costs above €1,000.
The risk of apprehension is highly variable and correlates directly with the method used:
Basic CEO impersonation scams (e.g., Gmail spoofing) typically involve few traceable elements, but these scams are way less likely to succeed. If the scam fails or the victim catches on, the attacker can usually disappear without consequence. However, advanced attacks involving malware, compromised emails, mule recruitment, or physical goods leave a wider forensic footprint.
Money laundering trails, IP logs, and digital evidence all increase the chances of law enforcement intervention. Jurisdiction matters, too: actors operating in countries with poor cybercrime cooperation face less risk. But attacks involving large financial transfers or well-known brands tend to draw regulatory and investigative scrutiny.
CEO scams have relatively low conversion rates, especially when targeting well-trained or high-maturity organisations. But the flipside is that they only need to work once, and a single successful deception can lead to a six-figure or seven-figure payout.
Social engineering complexity here is usually high: impersonating a known executive, timing the message correctly, and inserting into live conversations or transactions requires precise psychological manipulation. Barriers to success include smart payment authorisation workflows, high levels of security awareness, and secondary verification processes.
As a result, CEO scams aren't as scalable or high-volume as things like “Hi, Dad” scams, but their financial blast radius is far greater when they do land.
Despite the modest hit rate, the ROI is high due to the asymmetry between cost and potential gain: For example, a €3,000 investment in malware or fake accounts can return €300,000 or more in stolen funds. Physical goods scams involving electronics, luxury items, or pharmaceuticals can be resold quickly for a high margin, especially when infrastructure (warehouses, mules) is already in place.
CEO scams are high-effort, high-reward fraud schemes. While not as common or viral as other types of fraud, their impact per incident is massive. Recent research found that 89 percent of business email compromise scams now involve impersonating authority figures like CEOs and executives.
| Category | Score (/10) | Key Insights | |
| 1 | Initial Investment | Moderate · 6/10 |
Moderate. |
| 2 | Exposure Risk |
|
High. |
| 3 | Success Rate | Low to Moderate · 3/10 |
Low to Moderate. |
| 4 | Return on Investment | Moderate to High · 8/10 |
Moderate to High. |
Defending against CEO scams demands layered, proactive controls that address both technical weaknesses and behavioural blind spots.
Together, these strategic layers of defence make your organization a far more difficult target for CEO fraud, significantly reducing the chances of a successful scam.
To learn about these more in-depth, take a look at our Whitepaper: "Inside CEO Scams: A Dissection of Executive Fraud Campaigns".
Banks sit at the crossroads of these attacks. They are both:
An account can be “clean” one day and weaponised the next. Whether it’s a legitimate customer manipulated into becoming an unwitting mule or a fresh account opened with forged documents, financial institutions must rethink how trust is assigned and re-evaluated across the account lifecycle. Static risk models and infrequent reviews aren’t enough.
Traditional anti-fraud systems focus on known bad behaviours like suspicious IPs, location anomalies, and high-risk geographies. But CEO scams are built on contextual manipulation. Fraudsters time transfers to coincide with real events, mimicking vendors or internal hierarchies, and hijacking conversations already underway. Without pre-fraud signal intelligence, these signals appear benign in isolation and are likely to be dismissed as false positives.
Financial institutions must shift left to focus on detecting the signals of fraud staging rather than just blocking suspicious transactions.
Some real-life CEO scams that have been made public through traditional media.
Also in 2024, fraudsters created a deepfake of Mark Read, CEO of WPP, the world’s biggest advertising group. They set up a Microsoft Teams meeting and tried to use this fake voice to solicit funds from a department head at WPP. Ultimately, employee vigilance foiled this scam.
A key point to note is that as generative AI tools advance, fraudsters are gaining faster, cheaper access to hyper-personalised phishing lures, credible-looking business correspondence, and even deepfake audio to mimic executive voices.
For example, threat actors can easily train a tool like ElevenLabs to use a custom voice that replicates how your CEO or other executive speaks. Because CEOs and other executives are high-profile figures, they often appear in webinars or speak at industry conferences.
This provides fraudsters an abundance of raw materials needed to carry out credible CEO scams. When a fraudster can convincingly replicate a CEO’s voice on a WhatsApp call or drop a cloned face into a video message, traditional methods of verification begin to crumble.
At the same time, the barriers to creating mule accounts are falling. AI-generated documents, synthetic selfies, and spoofed onboarding videos mean identity verification checks, especially in digital-first platforms, can be defeated with worrying ease. This makes it even more difficult to track down the human infrastructure behind these scams, and easier for attackers to spin up disposable accounts for each operation.
Combating CEO scams requires continuous account analysis and classification: a continuous understanding of attacker psychology and tactics, and proactive classification of both first-party and counterparty accounts. Vigilance must evolve from reactive alerts to predictive prevention – which can be achieved with pre-fraud signal intelligence. When trust signals like voice and email can be faked with alarming ease, resilience is needed from systems designed to doubt, verify, and adapt.
Want to learn more about how Acoru does this? Request a demo here.