Social Engineering Examples is a free, public library of documented social engineering incidents - phishing, vishing, smishing, quishing, deepfakes, pretexting, physical intrusion and AI-powered attacks - built so that security teams, journalists and researchers can study how real attacks actually worked, not how vendors describe them in the abstract.
This library is maintained by Diopter, a company building real-time deepfake and synthetic-media detection for voice and video calls. We see the same handful of social engineering patterns show up again and again in the incidents we study, and we wanted a single place to point to them with sources attached, rather than relying on scattered blog posts and press coverage.
This site is independent editorial content. It is not a sales tool: there are no gated case studies, no lead forms, and no product pitch woven into the write-ups. Where a case is relevant to the kind of attack Diopter helps defend against, we say so plainly, and nowhere else.
Every case page documents one real, named incident: what happened, who it affected, the pretext or lure the attacker used, and the specific control or check that would have stopped it. Cases are organized into attack families so you can browse by technique, and every claim is sourced - see our methodology for how we vet and label each case.
If you find an error, a broken source link, or a case that should be reclassified, we want to know. Reach out via diopter.ai and we will review and correct the record.
Social Engineering Examples