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.
ConfirmedA federal grand jury in Columbia, South Carolina indicted 12 people on 12 counts (conspiracy, wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering) for a nationwide BEC ring that monitored hacked/compromised business email accounts, spoofed emails from trusted insiders and vendors to redirect wire payments, and laundered more than $25 million through sham U.S. companies before sending proceeds overseas.
ConfirmedA compromised email address was used to redirect a $30,750 solar-panel-installation payment from a Wheeling, WV economic development nonprofit into a mule account, part of a broader roughly $220,000 fraud scheme that produced a federal wire fraud guilty plea.
ConfirmedScammers hijacked a real invoice thread between an Arkansas school district, its contractor, and its architect, then used a lookalike "easthardings.com" domain to redirect a $3.2M construction payment to accounts they controlled.
ConfirmedA Houston- and California-based ring spoofed or compromised business emails to trick five 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 before two ringleaders were sentenced to federal prison in February 2026.
ConfirmedScammers impersonating a school construction contractor sent a forged bank-account-change request, and Cabarrus County, NC wired $2.5M to the fraud account, losing $1.73M net.
ConfirmedA finance employee in Arup's Hong Kong office wired HK$200M (~US$25.6M) after a video conference in which the CFO and colleagues were all AI-generated deepfakes.
ConfirmedA "complex criminal phishing scheme" fraudulently induced Argan, Inc. to send two outbound wires on March 6-7, 2023, producing a roughly $3 million pre-tax loss with only about $0.2M potentially recoverable through insurance.
Social Engineering Examples