I'm a free subscriber to the online version of The New Yorker. Today, they sent me a link to an article with the same title as this thread. I just finished reading said article and thought it might be worthy of a discussion. Here's a few paragraphs from its introduction and conclusion that I think are worth noting...

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In the summer of 2017, Hazim Nada, a thirty-four-year-old American living in Como, Italy, received an automated text message from his mobile-phone carrier: How was our customer service? Puzzled, he called a friend at the company. Someone impersonating Nada had obtained copies of his call history. A few weeks later, his account manager at Credit Suisse alerted him that an impostor who sounded nothing like Nada—he has a slightly nasal, almost childlike voice—had phoned and asked for banking details. “I started to feel like somebody was trying to scam me,” Nada told me.

Nada was the founder of a nine-year-old commodities-trading business, Lord Energy. The “Lord” stood for “liquid or dry,” because the company shipped both crude oil and such drygoods as cement and corn. He had carved out a lucrative niche by establishing unconventional routes: Libya to Korea, Gabon to Italy. By the summer of 2017, Lord Energy, which was based in Lugano, a Swiss city across the border from Como, had a satellite office in Singapore, another opening in Houston, and annual revenue approaching two billion dollars.

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It is a violation of Swiss law to gather political or business intelligence for a foreign state, and someone convicted of the crime can be sentenced to three years in prison. British law allows sweeping claims of damages for defamation. Nada told me that he is talking to lawyers in the U.S. about enlisting other Brero targets in a class-action suit to be filed there. “They’ve messed with the wrong guy this time,” he told me.

Nada can expect a vigorous counterattack. Among the hacked files was a recording of a phone call with Matar about how to handle an e-mail from Nada threatening legal action. Ignore it, Matar told Brero. The U.A.E. was ready for war. “We’re fully, fully a hundred per cent behind you,” Matar said. “Whatever it takes.”
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Full article:
The dirty secrets of a smear campaign | The New Yorker