"Please don't send that bot anything": A Mixed-methods Study of Personal Impersonation Attacks Targeting Digital Payments on Social Media
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Presented at USENIX Security 2025 by
Personal impersonation attacks on social media are an emerging form of social engineering that exploit trust within interpersonal relationships to redirect digital payments. Unlike brand impersonation, these attacks target everyday users, leveraging real-time public interactions to deceive victims into transferring funds to attacker-controlled accounts. In this paper, we present the first in-depth study of PROSPER (Payment Re-routing on Social media via Personal Impersonation) attacks, focusing on their operational tactics, scale, and impact. Using a mixed-methods approach, we tracked 181 PROSPER attacks over a 3-month period, uncovering 70 distinct digital payment accounts and revealing human-in-the-loop scam operations alongside automated bots, as well as longstanding campaigns involving reused payment accounts.