A wave of graduates entering the job market could present new targets for scammers. New hires can often fall prey to “boss scams,” a variation of “spear-phishing” in which fraudsters pretend to be a supervisor, seeking help in purchasing gift cards for employees or customers. The victim passes the voucher onto the scammer, who then sells it on the dark web at a discount. “A new boss is someone that we don’t question. We don’t want to be seen rocking the boat,” Elisabeth Carter, criminologist at Kingston University and host of BBC Radio 4’s “Scam Secrets” podcast, told, adding that this is happening as the job market is more competitive than it has been in years. She argued that the boss scam taps into workers’ insecurities when starting a new job: They haven’t formed a trusted network, and they’re eager to please. Scammers are able to target these workers, the report said, using a type of social engineering scam that involves link analysis, or scraping data from social media platforms to learn the human relationships or connections inside an organization. In particular, they focus on job announcements on sites like LinkedIn, said Jason Hogg, executive chair of Cypfer, a cybersecurity specialist. “With the proliferation of large language models [fraudsters can] emulate human behavior, look up people’s profiles and connections and then behind the scenes be able to manipulate those connections and draw a social graph out,” Hogg said.