This past April, while attending his nephew’s bar mitzvah on Cape Cod, Eric Umansky woke up to an inbox full of emails from people from his past. They all wanted to know the same thing: Was he actually throwing a party Saturday night?
The New York–based journalist wasn’t sure what party they were referring to, or why random acquaintances he’d met in passing 15 years ago were emailing him. On deadline and already stressed about work, he checked his phone, where more messages inquired about a supposed Paperless Post invite he’d sent for a “Special Private Dinner Party” at 7 pm on May 2.
Except Umansky hadn’t sent the invite, and he wasn’t planning to host a party anytime soon.
As it turned out, he was an early victim of an email scam that has since become more widespread. What Umansky didn’t expect was the positive effect it would have on his social life.
In May, after receiving increased reports, the Federal Trade Commission issued a consumer alert warning about scammers sending “unexpected messages that look like they’re from well-known invitation platforms like Evite or Paperless Post,” noting how some messages “make you enter your email username and password to see event details” while others “tell you to enter a phone number and share a special code to RSVP.”
Umansky wasn’t sure how it happened; he thought he’d taken the necessary precautions to safeguard his email, including using two-factor authentication. All he could think to do was post a message on Facebook, LinkedIn, and his other social networks to notify people that he was, in fact, not having a party and, more importantly, “don’t come to my house.”
Phishing scams, which have proliferated across the last two decades, remain one of the biggest security risks faced both by individuals and companies. Email scams, in particular, can now be highly sophisticated, incorporating social engineering techniques like creating urgency or fear in a target and even leveraging the personal relationships between two people to manipulate a victim, what’s known as “spear phishing.” AI has only made those deceptions harder to weed out.
But in some recent cases, like Umansky’s, the fake party invite is having an unintended outcome: It is encouraging people to check in to see whether the message was actually real and, in doing so, has reignited dormant relationships.
“It was so striking to me after it happened that I actually had a thought that I was like, ‘Oh, is this a net positive?’” says Umansky, who over the last several months has reconnected with a handful of old friends and colleagues over lunch and via text. He recently spent an hour on Zoom with a former coworker who now lives in Mexico City. They hadn’t talked to each other in over a decade. “I was like, Oh, you know, I actually want to catch up with you about something. There was an idea I wanted to bat around with him, which we talked about for maybe 10 minutes. The rest of the time we talked about our lives.”
According to a 2024 study published in the scientific journal Communications Psychology examining social withdrawal, which surveyed 2,400 adults in the US, UK, and Canada, people are sometimes unwilling to contact old friends because they believe the other person won’t want to hear from them or they fear the interaction will be awkward. The research noted that “high priority placed on work and productivity in North America has led people to cut back on social connections and social time to meet increasing demands at work,” in addition to other life transitions, such as parenthood or moving to a new city.