Documented social engineering incidents targeting the consumer / general public sector, sourced and fact-checked.
Fraudsters plastered fake QR-code stickers over genuine PayByPhone parking codes at UK council car parks in Cheltenham, Swindon and Somerset.
ConfirmedA caller posing as a Standard Bank representative persuaded 18-year-old Reabetswe Modisane to move her R438.
ConfirmedA mass SMS phishing campaign impersonating U.S. toll agencies spoofed 'unpaid toll' notices, drawing 2,000+ FBI complaints within weeks.
ConfirmedA Singaporean finance professional in her 50s lost S$1.2 million.
ConfirmedA Singaporean businessman transferred at least S$4.9 million after WhatsApp and email lures citing the Strait of Hormuz crisis drew him into a deepfake.
ConfirmedScammers impersonating Southern California Edison used real-time-negotiated "pay now or we shut off your power in 30 minutes" phone and in-person threats.
ConfirmedCosta Rica-based ringleader Roger Roger used spoofed government caller ID to convince hundreds of elderly victims they had won sweepstakes prizes.
ConfirmedA joint FBI-Dubai Police-Chinese MPS-Royal Thai Police operation arrested 276+ people and dismantled 9 pig-butchering scam compounds abroad.
ConfirmedP&G-hired competitive-intelligence contractors retrieved roughly 80 unshredded confidential Unilever hair-care documents from the trash before P&G.
ConfirmedTwo Quebec fraudsters acting as courier and driver for an AI-voice-cloned "grandchild in crisis" vishing scheme that defrauded Saskatchewan seniors.
ConfirmedScammers papered roughly 200 counterfeit QR-code stickers over legitimate ParkMobile decals on downtown Orlando parking meters.
ConfirmedScammers impersonating PG&E threaten customers and small businesses with immediate service disconnection.
ConfirmedA Chicago hairstylist wired $20,000 of her own money to scammers after a caller impersonating Bank of America.
ConfirmedA Pakistani national in Sydney allegedly ran a callback-vishing scheme impersonating Optus and TPG Telecom support.
ConfirmedFraudsters hijacked a WhatsApp account via a malicious ZIP file, swapped in their own number while keeping the real display photo of former Rajya Sabha MP.
ConfirmedA Bengaluru retiree lost Rs 6.88 lakh after an AI-generated deepfake Facebook video falsely showed Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman endorsing a fake.
ConfirmedAn Atlantic City woman posed as a life-insurance/retirement-benefit representative on burner-phone calls to recently widowed elderly victims.
ConfirmedA Russian-speaking threat actor used disposable, one-conversation ChatGPT accounts to iteratively build and debug a Go-based Windows malware family.
ConfirmedA 16-member Colombian crime ring called and WhatsApp-messaged bank customers posing as fraud-prevention officers.
ConfirmedA retired New Jersey man lost $390,000 in two days after a fake Norton/PayPal refund call escalated into a bogus PNC "mistaken deposit" story that had him.
ConfirmedA retired 60-year-old Malaysian bank manager in Johor Baru lost RM936,000 (life savings) after a Macau-scam vishing syndicate posing successively.
ConfirmedImperva researcher Yohann Sillam showed that whitespace-padded prompt-injection payloads hidden in WhatsApp contact names, vCard FN fields.
ConfirmedDOJ's first-of-its-kind nationwide takedown charged 61 defendants and five Ahmedabad.
ConfirmedThe FTC's first major consumer alert on QR-code scams (Dec 6, 2023) warned of fake QR stickers on parking meters and phishing emails/texts using QR codes.
ConfirmedThe FBI, FTC, and USPIS each issued 2025 public warnings about "brushing 2.0" -- unsolicited packages containing QR codes that, when scanned.
ConfirmedA victim searching for the AnyDesk remote-access tool hit a typosquatted site with a fake Cloudflare Turnstile.
ConfirmedA convincing fake ChatGPT download site, openew[.]app -- reached in part via an AI-generated fake outage page rendered on a real chatgpt.com/s/ URL --.
ConfirmedThe FBI's IC3 issued a December 2024 public advisory detailing how criminals use AI-generated text, images, voice cloning.
ConfirmedIn June 2025 the DOJ filed a civil forfeiture complaint against more than $225.3M in Tether (USDT) traced to a global pig-butchering money-laundering.
ConfirmedA Dominican Republic call-center network ran a multi-role "grandparent"/"family-in-need-of-bail" scam: openers posed as a distressed grandchild.
ConfirmedA Brighton-area kitchen fitter lost roughly £76,000, including four loans he was pressured into taking out.
ConfirmedThe Caesars Entertainment breach: Scattered Spider social-engineered an IT help desk, stealing a loyalty database and prompting a $15M ransom in 2023.
ConfirmedDOJ/IRS-CI unsealed four indictments charging 28 members of a Chinese organized-crime money-laundering ring tied to India-based "mistaken refund".
ConfirmedDOJ/FTC alleged that Citizens Disability and subsidiary CD Media made 109 million-plus illegal telemarketing calls.
ConfirmedA long-running, India-based network of call centres impersonated the Canada Revenue Agency and RCMP in mass vishing calls that threatened tens.
ConfirmedA Taiwan-linked money courier was caught in an Austin bank sting while collecting part of the $1.4 million a victim lost to a pig-butchering scam.
ConfirmedGhanaian social-media personality Frederick Kumi ("Abu Trica") and co-defendant Daniel Yussif were federally indicted for leading a romance-fraud network.
ConfirmedDOJ alleges Ghanaian twins Jamal and Kamal Abubakari and U.S.-based Amanda Opoku-Boachie ran an AI-video-enabled romance fraud ring that used fictitious.
Social Engineering Examples