Global BEC spam volume by position 2020

This statistic presents the distribution of attempted business email compromise (BEC) scams worldwide in 2020, sorted by spoofed specific positions. According to the source, the most spoofed position was the CEO, meaning that 25.6 percent of BEC scammers pretended to be CEOs of their victim companies.

Distribution of attempted business email compromise (BEC) scams worldwide in 2020, by spoofed specific positions

Characteristic	Share of spoofed specific positions
CEO	25.6%
Managing Director/Director	24.3%
General Manager/Manager	10.7%
President	8.2%
Professor	1.5%
Others	29.7%

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Release date

February 2021

More information

Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

2020

Special properties

Trend Micro Smart Protection Network infrastructure; wider industry metrics may vary

Supplementary notes

BEC = Business Email Compromise (BEC) also known as “CEO Fraud”.
BEC is defined as a sophisticated scam targeting businesses working with foreign suppliers and/or businesses that regularly perform wire transfer payments. The scam is carried out by compromising legitimate business e-mail accounts through social engineering or computer intrusion techniques to conduct unauthorized transfers of funds.
Data refers to a sample set of BEC attempts seen, which does not indicate whether the attacks were successful.

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