When “opportunity” knocks, don’t answer.

In this episode of Hacking Humans, hosts Dave Bittner, Joe Kerrigan, and Maria Vermazis explore a range of social engineering scams that exploit human psychology and trust. The episode opens with lighthearted banter about chickens, roosters, and Australian slang, before diving into serious cybersecurity threats. A major focus is on a LinkedIn phishing campaign that uses urgent, fake messages about business opportunities to lure users into credential theft via lookalike domains. The hosts critique the platform’s growing reputation as a scam magnet. Next, they examine a shocking real-world scam on Mount Everest, where guides allegedly induced altitude sickness in climbers using baking soda and excessive water to trigger fraudulent emergency evacuations, bilking insurance companies out of $20 million. The episode then shifts to tax season, highlighting IRS impersonation scams, ghost tax preparers, and a new trend: phishing emails using legitimate remote monitoring tools to gain unauthorized access to victims’ computers. The episode concludes with a bizarre 'scambait' story from a Reddit thread involving a flirtatious online Scrabble game that quickly devolves into a predatory conversation, underscoring how even innocuous platforms can be weaponized. Throughout, the hosts emphasize the danger of over-trusting digital environments and the importance of skepticism, especially when urgency or personal data is involved.