FBI Shares Tips to Spot Fake Lawyer Schemes Targeting Crypto Scam Victims

By Kevin Poireault for Infosecurity Magazine
Thursday, August 14, 2025

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The FBI requested potential victims of fraudulent law firm scams to report the suspicious activity to their local FBI field office and IC3.

Fraud Syndicates Recruit Unwitting ‘Support Staff’ for Scams

Ilia Kolochenko, CEO at ImmuniWeb and a Fellow at the British Computer Society (BCS), said that while this type of scheme is not new, such an alert from the FBI suggests “that both the amplitude and scale of the fake-law-firms fraud have probably attained their historical record.”

"Alarmingly, a comparatively new trend is to breach legitimate law firms and misuse their infrastructure to send highly credible and trustworthy emails from real domains belonging to law firms. Some fraudsters take this scam to the next level by offering Zoom or phone calls with ‘lawyers’ who speak impeccable English or other languages and calmly explain how to ‘settle the matter’ in the simplest way,” Kolochenko noted.

Those are “not necessarily GenAI deepfakes,” but often people who have been recruited by organized fraud syndicates to provide “customer support,” without necessarily understanding the nature of the work they do.

“Once discovered, many will just silently quit the “job” without reporting the incident to law enforcement agencies, being afraid of criminal charges for aiding and abetting,” Kolochenko explained.

"Worse, the uncontrolled proliferation of fake law firms progressively erodes the trust in legitimate communications by real lawyers and law firms, eventually leading to increased costs of litigation and settlements,” he concluded. Read Full Article