Documented social engineering incidents targeting the construction & engineering sector, sourced and fact-checked.
Fraudsters posing as Tecnimont's group CEO, other executives, and a fictitious Swiss lawyer used spoofed emails and a staged series of conference calls about a fake confidential China acquisition to talk the Indian subsidiary's head into wiring $18.6 million to Hong Kong accounts in November 2018.
DocumentedA 12-person ring watched hacked inboxes for big payments, then redirected them with fake emails. Trial evidence put losses above $25M. Nine now convicted.
DocumentedScammers hijacked a real invoice thread with a lookalike domain and got an Arkansas school district to wire $3.2M. $1.1M recovered. How the thread hijack worked.
DocumentedA Houston- and California-based ring spoofed or compromised business emails to trick four companies and one New Jersey township into wiring over $2.5 million meant for real creditors into shell-company "money mule" accounts, which the defendants then laundered through layers of bank transfers; a mule-account operator drew the case's longest sentence in July 2025, months before two more defendants were sentenced in February 2026.
DocumentedScammers impersonating a school construction contractor submitted a bank-account-change request with seemingly valid documentation, and Cabarrus County, NC wired $2.5M to the fraud account, resulting in a reported $1.73M net loss.
DocumentedAn Arup employee in Hong Kong sent HK$200M (US$25.6M) after a video call where everyone else was a deepfake. How the fake meeting worked and what stops it.
DocumentedArgan's Fiscal 2024 cybersecurity disclosure described fraudulently induced outbound wire transfers in March 2023 and reported $2.7 million of loss, net of recovered funds and including related professional fees.
Social Engineering Examples