Documented social engineering incidents targeting the cryptocurrency & digital assets sector, sourced and fact-checked.
Scheme participants posed as veteran finance professionals inside private WhatsApp investment groups to lure at least 18 U.S. retail investors into a fake.
ConfirmedA joint FBI-Dubai Police-Chinese MPS-Royal Thai Police operation arrested 276+ people and dismantled 9 pig-butchering scam compounds abroad.
ConfirmedA smishing text plus a follow-up phone call using a deepfaked colleague's voice tricked a Retool employee into surrendering MFA codes.
ConfirmedThe FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report introduced its first dedicated AI-fraud tracking category, logging $893 million in losses.
ConfirmedA US Attorney's Office (EDVA) court order seized seven domains spoofing the Singapore International Monetary Exchange that pig-butchering scammers used.
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 --.
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.
ConfirmedLazarus-linked operators built polished fake job-interview sites impersonating Coinbase, Kraken, Circle and other crypto firms.
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.
ConfirmedLazarus operators spear-phished a senior Sky Mavis engineer through a fake LinkedIn recruiting process and a spyware-laced job-offer PDF.
AllegedBinance CCO Patrick Hillmann claimed scammers built an AI deepfake "hologram" of him from his TV interview footage and used it in live Zoom calls.
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.
ConfirmedAttackers phoned Twitter employees posing as IT help desk, harvested VPN credentials.
Social Engineering Examples