Documented social engineering incidents targeting the government & public sector sector, sourced and fact-checked.
A blogger paid $89.95 to an online data broker (CellTolls.com) to buy retired Gen. Wesley Clark's cell-phone call log obtained via carrier pretexting.
ConfirmedA Chinese national talked her way past three layers of Mar-a-Lago's Secret Service and club-staff checkpoints using a false pool visit and an unverified.
ConfirmedA Ukrainian-language "shared document" phishing wave used a fake reCAPTCHA "verify you are human" ClickFix page to trick victims into pasting and running.
ConfirmedFraudsters plastered fake QR-code stickers over genuine PayByPhone parking codes at UK council car parks in Cheltenham, Swindon and Somerset.
ConfirmedCensys researchers used passive DNS to unravel a live USPS/UPS "package awaiting action" smishing operation.
ConfirmedA mass SMS phishing campaign impersonating U.S. toll agencies spoofed 'unpaid toll' notices, drawing 2,000+ FBI complaints within weeks.
ConfirmedA nation-state cyberweapon crossed an air gap into Iran's Natanz nuclear facility on infected USB drives carried in by trusted contractors.
ConfirmedAn unidentified impersonator used an AI-cloned voice and a hacked personal-contacts list to pose as White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
ConfirmedA Pennsylvania shredding-business owner's 2010 qui tam suit alleged that Shred-It, Iron Mountain.
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.
ConfirmedGoogle's GTIG and Ukraine's CERT-UA documented PROMPTSTEAL (aka LAMEHUG).
ConfirmedA compromised email address was used to redirect a $30,750 solar-panel-installation payment from a Wheeling.
ConfirmedScammers papered roughly 200 counterfeit QR-code stickers over legitimate ParkMobile decals on downtown Orlando parking meters.
ConfirmedImpersonators posing as two School District of Philadelphia vendors switched payments to ACH and diverted nearly $700,000 into fraud accounts.
ConfirmedA forged "change your remittance bank account" email tricked a Puerto Rico government corporation into wiring $2.6M to a fraudster-controlled account.
ConfirmedAttackers hijacked the New Haven school COO's email, quietly monitored a real $5.9M bus-contract payment thread.
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 Houston- and California-based ring spoofed business emails to trick five companies and a New Jersey township into wiring over $2.5 million.
ConfirmedA spoofed-email scheme impersonating MacEwan University's trusted general contractor, Clark Builders.
ConfirmedA lone, unidentified hacker jailbroke Anthropic's Claude Code coding agent with a fake "authorized bug bounty/pentest" pretext and paired it.
ConfirmedA Tennessee school district's finance director wired $3.36M in state education funds to fraudsters impersonating textbook vendor Pearson from a look-alike.
ConfirmedA revived Lampion banking-trojan campaign spoofed Portugal's tax authority site to trick victims into pasting a PowerShell command into the Windows Run.
ConfirmedTejay Fletcher founded and ran iSpoof, a Bitcoin-subscription caller-ID spoofing and OTP-interception platform that let fraudsters impersonate bank.
ConfirmedDOJ's first-of-its-kind nationwide takedown charged 61 defendants and five Ahmedabad.
ConfirmedBetween 2000 and 2009, GAO undercover investigators repeatedly used fake law-enforcement badges (and, in a related 2009 test.
ConfirmedRussian GRU-linked Forest Blizzard (APT28/Fancy Bear) used OpenAI's GPT-4-family LLM services to research satellite communication protocols and radar.
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.
ConfirmedFTC's December 2024 Data Spotlight quantified an explosion in "task scams," gamified job-offer frauds launched via unsolicited text/WhatsApp messages.
ConfirmedBetween 2006 and 2008 the FTC sued 16 data-broker and private-investigation defendants who pretexted telecom carriers.
ConfirmedCriminals impersonated a trusted vendor over email and redirected two building-fund payments totaling $4.92M from a North Dakota school district.
ConfirmedRussian GRU officers spoofed Google security-alert emails to phish 300+ Democratic campaign staff, stealing 50,000+ of John Podesta's emails.
ConfirmedOperation Buckshot Yankee: a malware-laden USB drive plugged into a U.S. military laptop in 2008 spread the agent.btz worm onto classified DoD networks.
ConfirmedScammers impersonating a school construction contractor sent a forged bank-account-change request, and Cabarrus County.
ConfirmedA long-running, India-based network of call centres impersonated the Canada Revenue Agency and RCMP in mass vishing calls that threatened tens.
ConfirmedDOJ/IRS-CI unsealed four indictments charging 28 members of a Chinese organized-crime money-laundering ring tied to India-based "mistaken refund".
ConfirmedA compromised Constant Contact account let Russia-linked Nobelium send USAID-spoofed phishing emails to 150-350 government and NGO organizations.
ConfirmedIn late December 2012, attackers rigged the Council on Foreign Relations website to silently exploit an Internet Explorer zero-day and drop malware.
ConfirmedA suspected Chinese state-sponsored group jailbroke Anthropic's Claude Code by role-playing a "defensive security" pretext and used it to autonomously run.
ConfirmedA single cybercriminal used Anthropic's Claude Code as an autonomous operator to breach ~17 organizations and generate psychologically targeted.
ConfirmedAn interstate Indian gang used AI-generated "eye-blink" deepfake videos made from stolen social-media photos to fool Aadhaar's facial-liveness e-KYC.
ConfirmedHours before Maharashtra's 2024 assembly election polling, BJP-amplified audio clips purporting to catch opposition leaders Supriya Sule and Nana Patole.
Social Engineering Examples