Many targeted scams begin before the phishing email, fake call, or stolen credential. They begin with information collected, inferred, enriched, and sold through legal data markets.

Data brokers, people-search services, public records, advertising data, and breach information can reveal where someone lives, who they trust, what they own, and when they may be vulnerable. Combined, this data becomes operational intelligence for fraud.

This session maps that pipeline from data collection and target selection through relationship mapping, impersonation, and payment coercion. It also introduces a practical framework for assessing when lawful data practices create fraud-enablement risk and where defenders, platforms, financial institutions, and policymakers can intervene before victim contact occurs.

Session Type: Law and Policy / Cybercrime / Data Protection / Emerging Threats

Technical Level: Intermediate

Preferred Duration: 45 minutes

Target Audience: Security researchers, privacy professionals, threat intelligence teams, fraud investigators, financial institutions, policymakers, platform security teams, data governance leaders, and consumer protection professionals.

Topics Covered:

• Data brokers and identity-resolution systems
• People-search platforms and public-record aggregation
• Advertising data and audience enrichment
• Breach data combined with lawful consumer information
• Household, relationship, and social-graph mapping
• Behavioral inference and vulnerability proxies
• Life-event and timing intelligence
• Fraud targeting and impersonation workflows
• Data minimization, deletion, and access controls
• Regulatory and accountability gaps
• Defensive intervention points across the data lifecycle

Original Contribution:

This session introduces the Fraud Enablement Risk Model, a framework for evaluating whether a dataset, enrichment service, or profiling capability materially increases the precision, credibility, or scalability of targeted fraud.

Rather than treating privacy, data brokerage, and cybercrime as separate domains, the session maps how they operate as one connected system.

The presentation is vendor-neutral and grounded in documented fraud patterns, data-broker practices, cybersecurity reporting, and consumer scam cases.

First Public Delivery: New for 2026