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Social Snowball Hit by Impersonation Scheme Spreading False Claims

Social Snowball Stops Malicious Email Impersonation Attack

Social Snowball, a creator-affiliate platform serving over 2,000 e-commerce brands, reports experiencing a coordinated attack where multiple fake emails purporting to be from former employees were sent to its customers and partners.

The attack was uncovered when founder & CEO Noah Tucker finished a customer meeting on Monday, Jan. 27, only to find numerous urgent messages. “All these people were saying, ‘Hey, what’s going on? One of your ex-employees reached out to me,'” Noah says. “Maybe 20 different people sent me that in the matter of like 30 minutes.”

The first wave of emails impersonated a former employee, Katie, who left the company in 2024. The attackers created fake email accounts using her name and profile photo to allege that Social Snowball was engaging in illegal data-sharing practices.

Social Snowball Stops Malicious Email Impersonation Attack


Source: Screenshot image supplied by Snowball

Noah categorically denies these claims, stating that the company follows strict data privacy guidelines and restricts employee access to customer data. “Our privacy policy very explicitly states how we handle data,” Noah says. “We have a great CTO and leadership team that’s on top of these things.”

Social Snowball Stops Malicious Email Impersonation Attack


Source: LinkedIn

The attackers obtained email addresses from publicly available lead websites such as Apollo, targeting both current and former customers. Noah confirms no breach of Social Snowball’s internal systems occurred. Several impersonated former employees have publicly refuted the allegations on LinkedIn and X, affirming their positive experiences with the company.

The incident sparked support from the broader e-commerce and influencer marketing community, with many recipients immediately recognizing the emails as fraudulent. Even competitors reached out to express solidarity in what Noah describes as the first major attempt to undermine customer trust in the platform since its founding in 2019.

Founded in Miami, Social Snowball provides affiliate and referral marketing services to e-commerce brands, including Solawave, Kizik, and Mid Day Squares. 

While the company has not identified the perpetrator, Noah suggests the attack may have been orchestrated by a competitor, though he expresses doubt that legitimate industry players would employ such tactics. “If a competitor were to do this and it would get found out that it was them, that would completely ruin their business,” he says.

Noah indicates they are investigating the source of the attack but did not specify the nature of these efforts. The campaign represents a novel approach to corporate sabotage in the creator economy space. “It was something that you would just never plan for,” Noah notes.

Social Snowball continues its normal operations while working to identify the source of the attack. The company maintains that its security systems and data privacy practices remain uncompromised, with Noah stating that “whoever did this tried to do a lot of damage to us and wasn’t able to do so.”

Social Snowball Stops Malicious Email Impersonation Attack
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Dragomir is a Serbian freelance blog writer and translator. He is passionate about covering insightful stories and exploring topics such as influencer marketing, the creator economy, technology, business, and cyber fraud.

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