To better understand the goals and methodology of business email compromise (BEC) scams, cybersecurity company Barracuda compiled statistics from 3,000 incidents it observed. Among other findings, Barracuda observed that about 60 percent of BEC attacks do not involve a link: the attack is simply a plain text email intended to fool the recipient to commit a wire transfer or send sensitive information. Because they don't contain any suspicious links, these messages often go undetected by email security systems. Additionally, Barracuda found that in about 43 percent of the cases the CEO was the impersonated sender, while the targets were spread much more equally across different departments and roles. Barracuda’s coverage includes examples of some of the BEC scams victims received, providing potential, future recipients of BEC scam attempts with invaluable information for detecting and avoiding this particularly pernicious and persisent brand of fraud. Barracuda.