# Landon Winkelvoss

Landon Winkelvoss writes about fraud prevention and cybersecurity, sharing practical guidance on scams, phishing, and protecting consumers and businesses. Winkelvoss's posts also describe Backgrounder’s scam-reporting and protection tools.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/landon-winkelvoss/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/landonwinkelvoss
- LinkedIn followers: 5,255
- Topics: social-engineering
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-09-09

## Summary

Landon Winkelvoss is most useful for practical fraud prevention content on scams, phishing, and reporting.

- Best for: A fraud prevention or consumer protection platform wanting advisory content and practitioner education.
- Not for: Enterprise security vendors wanting high reach or technical threat intelligence campaigns.
- Check first: Confirm partnership terms and audience analytics before writing a plan.

### Takeaways

- Most scam victims never report; reducing friction is the fix.
- For government impersonation scams, a firm callback rule beats judging the caller.
- A phishing domain stayed up for 79 days after detection.

## Main ideas

- **Most scam victims never report; reducing friction is the fix**: Landon Winkelvoss argues that scam victims stay silent less from ignorance than from friction and shame: embarrassment, the belief that nothing can be done, and the expectation that reporting a $200 loss means filling out a 90-minute IC3 form. Underreporting helps fraud networks: early reports make it harder for a scam operation to rebrand and reuse the same infrastructure. Backgrounder’s free reporting flow offers a practical alternative: send an email, Telegram message or investment pitch, describe the scam as much as you’re comfortable with, and get a research-backed answer in minutes—without a login wall, five-page form or fee. The post also promises anonymity in the published answer and the option to alert others.
- **Impersonation is usually caught after the damage, so verification has to become a habit**: The problem is structural: few people create profiles across the whole internet, so technology companies often detect impersonation only after it has been used—and scammers know it. People contacted by a fake identity can’t rely on a platform to flag it in advance; they need to verify for themselves. Landon extends the point from high-profile cases to everyday attacks on consumers, small businesses and managed service providers.
- **Changing your password won’t remove an attacker from your email account**: Landon Winkelvoss explains that attackers often leave forwarding rules, filters or active sessions in place so they can keep watching an inbox after a password change. A reset closes one door, not the others, which is why incident responders check for persistence first. The post offers three ways to check whether a Gmail or Outlook account is still compromised and links to a video walkthrough of next steps. It’s a practical pick for anyone whose account was just breached and who doesn’t know what to inspect.
- **For government impersonation scams, a firm callback rule beats judging the caller**: Trying to judge whether a caller sounds legitimate is the wrong defense, Landon Winkelvoss argues: scammers are practiced at applying pressure and offering reassurance. Instead, they recommend a fixed rule that doesn’t depend on the victim’s judgment in the moment: hang up, look up the agency’s real number yourself and call back. Legitimate agencies expect and understand this, so ending the original call costs you nothing and breaks the scammer’s control of the conversation.
- **Knowing a phishing site is fake doesn’t mean it gets taken down**: Landon Winkelvoss argues that phishing defense falters not for lack of awareness but because of the time between identifying a malicious site and getting it removed. A domain can be reported in the security community and labeled by security blogs yet still reach real users, because takedown depends on hosting and infrastructure providers acting on abuse reports. That makes automated abuse reports a priority, bringing blocking and takedown closer to real time. The post presents Backgrounder with Ask Carmen as a way to do that passively across devices and channels, and shows Landon highlighting team work rather than solo analysis.

## Work to read

- [A password reset is not enough: checking Gmail or Outlook after an email compromise](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/landonwinkelvoss_cybersecurity-emailsecurity-phishing-activity-7503452657945178113-oghl)
- [Government impersonation: three rules that legitimate agencies never break](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/landonwinkelvoss_fraudprevention-scamalert-governmentimpersonation-activity-7480248017648906240-BMYH)
- [The 4th of July Evite scam: a phishing domain that stayed up for 79 days](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/landonwinkelvoss_fraudprevention-phishingscams-scamalert-activity-7477790571839877121-mZ2u)
- [A free reporting flow for scam victims](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/landonwinkelvoss_fraudprevention-scamreporting-backgrounder-activity-7473731065141039104-bm0a)
- [The 49ers impersonation scam and why fake identity is an everyday problem](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/landonwinkelvoss_stories-like-this-make-the-news-because-theyre-activity-7500573164565929984-z_jo)

## Brand relationships

- **Backgrounder** (disclosed_partnership)

## Partnerships

Landon Winkelvoss's posts cover fraud prevention, phishing, and impersonation, focusing on Backgrounder and Ask Carmen, the scam-reporting and protection products they say they built. They promote a free reporting flow, direct readers to a blog for remediation guidance, credit a team member's forensic work on a phishing domain, and argue for faster abuse reporting and takedowns. The posts read as company and product communication, not an offer to outside brands, and disclose no paid partnerships, sponsored placements, or advertiser relationships. A cybersecurity or fraud-prevention company considering a thought-leadership or advisory content partnership can view the posts as evidence of subject-matter expertise and an owned content channel, but should ask Winkelvoss or Backgrounder about formats, deliverables, pricing, disclosure practices, and approval processes before planning a campaign.

## Alternatives

- Salman Hussain: Choose Salman Hussain when a campaign needs an executive-risk and governance framing rather than a consumer scam-reporting angle. The posts address C-suite impersonation and CEO fraud in the Gulf, AI and deepfake voice/video in social engineering, and process controls such as verifying financial requests through an independent channel, dual approvals, segregation of duties, executive exposure assessments and BEC simulations. A second post treats a reported silent on-device AI download in Chrome as a question of consent, privacy, supply-chain trust and AI governance. This material suits a partner selling to CISOs, risk leaders or enterprises seeking a leadership-level take on impersonation and AI-enabled fraud, or a campaign targeting Gulf and broader enterprise audiences.
- Carlton Brailey: Choose Carlton Brailey when a campaign targets small businesses or IT providers and focuses on credential theft and malware hygiene. The posts explain a reported threefold rise in malware targeting password managers, describe memory scraping, registry harvesting and cloud or local vault attacks, and explain why vaults are efficient targets. They then offer a hardening list: unique passwords, multi-factor authentication, a strong master password, biometric login and business-grade vault administration. A second post covers malware volume, encrypted threats, slow patching, endpoint protection, employee training and backups. This structure suits a partner seeking plain-language teaching content with checklists for SMB owners, MSP audiences or employees.
- Alexander Oddo: Choose Alexander Oddo when a campaign wants accessible thought leadership connecting cybersecurity to wider business culture and current events. One post builds an argument about AI behavior, testing, unintended paths and humility around a Jurassic Park analogy and a disclosed AI testing episode, while stating optimism about AI across business, healthcare, education and security. The other uses a soccer loss to argue that cybersecurity should be taught early as a basic life skill, with lessons on recognizing suspicious messages, questioning unusual requests, protecting credentials and pausing before clicking. This suits an awareness-culture campaign, a general business audience or a partner seeking an optimistic AI-and-risk voice rather than an incident-led one.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/