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.
But a suspicious party invite is exactly the kind of low-stakes incentive that has made initiating contact easier because it represents the one thing we all crave: a sense of belonging.
According to Lara Aknin, a professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University whose research has explored the hesitancy around reconnecting with lapsed contacts, only 30 percent of people actually check in with an old friend “even when we make doing so as easy as possible by helping them identify a desirable, feasible, and low-risk contact.”
With email scams, “people are motivated and willing to reach out to an old friend because the scam provides a legitimate excuse or social cover to do so,” she says. “In fact, people may even be slightly grateful for the reconnection opportunity this context affords, even though they hope the scam is false.”
Most people will only have a small number of close relationships in their lifetime, and it is even fewer these days; nearly half of the population (44 percent) have five or fewer acquaintances. “In the course of [scammers] taking advantage of that real desire, they are actually helping fill it,” Umansky says.
He’s not the only one who has reignited old relationships after being targeted by a scam. “I heard from a friend of more than 30 years,” Larry Persily wrote in the Wrangell Sentinel, a local newspaper in Alaska, of the trend. One source confirms with WIRED that they are back in touch with an ex they haven’t spoken to in years after receiving a fake invite.
To be clear, the unintended consequence of scam attempts may be reconnecting with lost friends, but they’re not all Zoom reunions and brunch. The FBI estimates that scammers tricked Americans out of $21 billion in 2025 alone, with help from AI.
Some of us remain impervious to the lure of the phishing trap invite. In late August, I received an unexpected Paperless Post invite—“Raise a Glass! Dinner & Drinks” the subject line read—from an acquaintance I hadn’t spoken to since 2017, though I immediately deleted it because I could barely remember who he was or why we even exchanged emails. I probably should have reached out. Maybe we both would’ve enjoyed the catch-up.
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