Documented social engineering incidents targeting the media & entertainment 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, and the resulting exposé triggered FTC enforcement, congressional hearings, and the 2006 federal law criminalizing pretexting for phone records.
ConfirmedFraudsters built a fake WhatsApp profile of WPP CEO Mark Read and staged a Microsoft Teams call using an AI voice clone and repurposed YouTube footage of a second executive to try to trick a WPP agency leader into setting up a "new business" for money and personal details; the target grew suspicious and the attempt failed.
ConfirmedNorth Korean operators spear-phished Sony Pictures staff with fake Apple ID "verify your account" emails, harvested reused credentials, and detonated wiper malware that crippled the studio.
ConfirmedChinese state-linked hackers used spear-phishing links and an unpatched Internet Explorer zero-day to breach Google, Adobe, and dozens of other US tech and defense firms in a campaign that stole source code, targeted Gmail accounts of human-rights activists, and led Google to publicly confront China and stop censoring its search results.
ConfirmedFraudsters spoofing the French CEO's "personal" email talked Pathé's Dutch management into wiring €19.2M for a fake secret Dubai acquisition, costing two executives their jobs.
ConfirmedTo unmask a boardroom leaker, HP's leak investigators and their hired data brokers impersonated directors and journalists to trick phone carriers into handing over private call records, triggering a congressional hearing and California felony charges.
ConfirmedFraudsters posing as RBS fraud-team staff talked Hamilton Academical FC's sole authorised banking employee into moving nearly £1 million into 26 "safe" accounts over two days in October 2017, netting roughly £800,000 after partial recovery and triggering a club lawsuit against the bank over its duty of care.
ConfirmedA scammer posing as GCI's CFO emailed payroll and, after the employee's initial pushback, persuaded them to hand over 2015 W-2s for every GCI, Denali Media, UUI and Unicom worker.
ConfirmedIn the same January 12, 2010 blog post disclosing Operation Aurora, Google revealed that dozens of Gmail accounts belonging to human-rights activists in the US, China, and Europe had been "routinely accessed by third parties, most likely via phishing scams or malware," a separate, longer-running espionage campaign against individual activists, distinct from the corporate network intrusion.
ConfirmedDow Chemical and Sasol paid PR firms Ketchum and Dezenhall, who subcontracted private intelligence firm Beckett Brown International to run over 120 dumpster-diving raids on Greenpeace's DC offices between July 1998 and July 2000, including using a bribed/subcontracted DC police officer's badge to bypass a locked trash enclosure.
ConfirmedHackers bought a $10 stolen Slack session cookie, used it to reach EA's internal Slack, then twice talked EA IT support into issuing a fresh MFA token by claiming a lost phone, then walked straight into EA's network and out with ~780GB including FIFA 21 and Frostbite engine source code.
ConfirmedToronto podcast-analytics company CoHost spent two months and seven interview rounds with a candidate later revealed as an AI-fabricated persona whose "references" used voice/video filters mimicking his mannerisms on camera, with every digital trace vanishing within 30 minutes of rejection.
Social Engineering Examples