Documented social engineering incidents targeting the media & entertainment sector, sourced and fact-checked.
A phone-record pretexting incident involving a retired U.S. Army general was followed by FTC enforcement and broader privacy-policy scrutiny.
DocumentedFraudsters faked WPP CEO Mark Read on WhatsApp and staged a Teams call with a cloned executive voice. The agency head said no. Why that matters.
DocumentedNorth Korea-linked attackers phished Sony staff with fake Apple ID emails, stole data and wiped thousands of PCs in 2014. How it worked and what it cost.
DocumentedFraudsters 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.
DocumentedChinese 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 intellectual property, targeted Gmail accounts of human-rights activists, and led Google to publicly confront China and stop censoring its search results.
DocumentedFraudsters 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, leaving the club with a reported outstanding loss of roughly £800,000 after partial recovery and prompting plans to pursue RBS over its duty of care.
DocumentedThe HP spying scandal began with a hunt for a boardroom leaker. Hewlett-Packard's investigators hired contractors who posed as directors and journalists to get their phone records from carriers. When it came out in 2006, it cost HP a $14.5M civil settlement with California. Then came a congressional hearing, felony charges against five people (chairwoman Patricia Dunn among them), and federal guilty pleas from three contractors.
DocumentedA 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.
Reported/allegedGreenpeace alleged in a civil suit, dismissed in both forums without any finding on the merits, that Dow Chemical and CONDEA Vista Company (bought by Sasol Ltd. in 2001 and sued as Sasol North America, Inc.) had, through two public relations firms, subcontracted the private intelligence firm Beckett Brown International to run repeated trash-collection raids on its Washington DC offices between 1998 and 2000, one subcontractor being a District of Columbia police officer engaged off duty and expected to use his badge to reach a locked trash enclosure.
DocumentedThe EA data breach began in June 2021, when hackers used a Slack session cookie they said cost $10 to get into Electronic Arts' Slack. Posing as an employee who'd lost a phone, they got IT support to issue an MFA token. They took game source code, including FIFA 21, and asked $28 million for it. EA said no player data was accessed. A documented incident.
DocumentedTwo New Jersey men ran US "laptop farms" and shell companies that let North Korean IT workers use the stolen identities of real Americans to hold remote jobs at more than 100 US firms, generating over $5 million for the DPRK regime and enabling theft of ITAR-controlled defense data before both were sentenced to federal prison in April 2026.
Reported/allegedToronto firm CoHost spent two months interviewing a candidate it now believes was a fabricated persona with fake references. The warning signs.
Social Engineering Examples