Documented social engineering incidents targeting the cryptocurrency & digital assets sector, sourced and fact-checked.
Fake finance "directors" in WhatsApp groups steered 18+ US investors to NanoBit, a crypto platform that never traded. The SEC won a $5.5M default judgment.
DocumentedDubai Police raided nine pig butchering centres and arrested 275, and San Diego charged six alleged scam-compound managers and recruiters. What is known.
DocumentedA fake IT text and phone call got a Retool employee's MFA codes in 2023. Google Authenticator sync did the rest: 27 crypto accounts hijacked. What happened.
DocumentedA US Attorney's Office (EDVA) court order seized seven domains spoofing the Singapore International Monetary Exchange that pig-butchering scammers used to defraud five US victims of over $10 million after grooming them via dating apps, social media, and messaging platforms.
DocumentedA 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 -- used malvertising and SEO poisoning to push Windows visitors to a credential-stealing loader and Mac visitors to Odyssey Stealer (an AMOS/Atomic Stealer fork) that also swapped in trojanized Ledger and Trezor wallet apps.
Research/advisoryThe FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report tracked AI fraud for the first time: 22,364 complaints and $893M lost. What the number means and what it doesn't.
DocumentedIn June 2025 the DOJ filed to forfeit $225.3M in USDT tied to pig butchering scams, after Tether and OKX flagged accounts. What the numbers mean.
DocumentedNorth Korea-linked hackers ran fake job interviews for crypto firms, then told applicants to paste a 'camera fix' that installed malware. How ClickFake works.
DocumentedAn Austin man lost $1,408,850 to a fake DAIQ crypto platform found on LINE. A staged $40,000 handoff led police to a 34-year-old courier. How it worked.
DocumentedLazarus hackers used a fake LinkedIn job offer to plant spyware on a Sky Mavis engineer's laptop, then drained $540M from the Ronin bridge in March 2022.
Reported/allegedBinance's comms chief said scammers used an AI "hologram" of him on Zoom calls. The impersonation is real; the deepfake was never shown. What the record supports.
DocumentedProsecutors allege Ghanaian twins used fake female personas and AI video to take $15M+ from 130+ older Americans. What is alleged and what isn't known.
DocumentedIn July 2020, callers posing as Twitter IT stole staff logins and hit 130 accounts, from Obama to Musk, with a bitcoin scam. How it worked and how it ended.
Social Engineering Examples