Documented social engineering incidents targeting the manufacturing & industrial sector, sourced and fact-checked.
A phishing email tricked Unatrac's CFO into surrendering his Office365 credentials on a fake Microsoft login page.
ConfirmedA European subsidiary of Toyota parts maker Toyota Boshoku wired roughly 4 billion yen (~$37M) to criminals in August 2019 after acting on fraudulent.
ConfirmedA mass-phishing malware infection at Target's small HVAC contractor harvested vendor-portal credentials that attackers reused to pivot.
ConfirmedFraudsters posing as Tecnimont's group CEO, other executives, and a fictitious Swiss lawyer used spoofed emails and a staged series of conference calls.
ConfirmedAdvance Machine Company's West Coast sales manager repeatedly rifled Tennant Company's sealed, covered dumpster in California to steal sales leads.
ConfirmedImpostors posing as Scoular's CEO and a KPMG partner convinced the controller a secret China acquisition was underway.
ConfirmedA spoofed email impersonating Seagate's CEO tricked an HR/payroll employee into emailing every 2015 W-2 to a scammer.
ConfirmedA federal grand jury in Columbia, South Carolina indicted 12 people on 12 counts (conspiracy, wire fraud, bank fraud.
ConfirmedA small Columbus, Ohio manufacturer disclosed in a February 2026 SEC 8-K that it lost $898,325 to an imposter scam executed with bank fraud.
ConfirmedA Pune CFO wired Rs 56 lakh after a Microsoft Teams message impersonating her Italian CEO demanded an urgent transfer.
ConfirmedEvaldas Rimasauskas ran a five-year, $120M fraud against Google and Facebook using forged Quanta Computer invoices.
ConfirmedChinese state-linked hackers used spear-phishing links and an unpatched Internet Explorer zero-day to breach Google, Adobe.
ConfirmedA non-executive Orion S.A. finance employee was manipulated by a criminal scheme into sending multiple outbound wires totaling roughly $60M.
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 Houston- and California-based ring spoofed business emails to trick five companies and a New Jersey township into wiring over $2.5 million.
ConfirmedFraudsters impersonating Leoni AG executives tricked its Romanian subsidiary into wiring roughly EUR 40 million ($44.6M) to attackers.
ConfirmedA fraudulent email impersonating The Depository Trust Company (DTC) supplied fake wire instructions for JE Cleantech Holdings' declared cash dividend.
AllegedJLR's five-week production halt and record £1.9bn UK economic hit were first blamed on helpdesk-vishing by a criminal collective calling itself.
ConfirmedDow Chemical and Sasol paid PR firms who subcontracted a private intelligence firm to run over 120 dumpster-diving raids on Greenpeace's DC offices.
ConfirmedTwo New Jersey men ran US "laptop farms" and shell companies that let North Korean IT workers pose as American remote employees at 100+ US firms.
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 fraudster posing as AFGlobal's CEO, backed by a fake KPMG "attorney," pressured the accounting director into wiring $480,000 to a Chinese bank.
Social Engineering Examples