Scammers are increasingly targeting athletes with advanced social engineering attacks, the Guardian reports. The Guardian cites a recent report from Ernst & Young that found that athletes and teams have lost nearly $1 billion to fraud over the past twenty years, and more than 40% of these losses were reported in the past six years.
“Many players make at least as much as senior executives in conventional industries,” the Guardian says. “However, big corporations are likely to have dedicated digital security teams and thorough cybersecurity protocols. That’s not the case for sportspeople, where the public nature of the job means the focus is on physical protection: bodyguards. But players are often young and inexperienced, bored or distracted during travel and down-time, and glued to mobile phones. The small screen can make it tougher to spot phishing scams compared with a laptop or an office environment.”
AI-assisted spear phishing and deepfakes are enhancing these attacks, which are targeting athletes at all levels of sport. Attackers can use publicly available information to craft highly personalized attacks against professional and student athletes, as well as their families, friends, and associates.
“Media attention, readily-available biographical information and weak privacy protections in the US mean that anyone can quickly find a trove of personal details on almost any American collegiate or professional athlete: photographs, date and place of birth, size, weight, where they went to school and university, hobbies, income and family background,” the Guardian says. “Even phone numbers, home and email addresses and social security numbers, which are often acquired from massive data breaches.”
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The Guardian has the story: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/may/15/sports-athletes-scams-cybercrimes
