Pretexting is the invented scenario that makes any of the other techniques work - as in the Hewlett-Packard boardroom spying scandal, Kevin Mitnick posing as Novell tech support to steal NetWare source code, and the Clorox and Cognizant help-desk breach - where an attacker poses as a journalist, an auditor, a new hire, or a vendor to extract information or access under a false identity. These 28 cases span corporate espionage, elder fraud, and impersonation schemes that unfolded over weeks rather than a single call or email.
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.
PAAn unidentified impersonator used an AI-cloned voice and a hacked personal-contacts list to pose as White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
PAA Pennsylvania shredding-business owner's 2010 qui tam suit alleged that Shred-It, Iron Mountain.
PAScammers impersonating Southern California Edison used real-time-negotiated "pay now or we shut off your power in 30 minutes" phone and in-person threats.
PAA 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.
PACosta Rica-based ringleader Roger Roger used spoofed government caller ID to convince hundreds of elderly victims they had won sweepstakes prizes.
PAA joint FBI-Dubai Police-Chinese MPS-Royal Thai Police operation arrested 276+ people and dismantled 9 pig-butchering scam compounds abroad.
PAScammers impersonating PG&E threaten customers and small businesses with immediate service disconnection.
PAA Chicago hairstylist wired $20,000 of her own money to scammers after a caller impersonating Bank of America.
PAFugitive hacker Kevin Mitnick impersonated a vacationing Novell employee on a "top-secret" project.
PAAn Atlantic City woman posed as a life-insurance/retirement-benefit representative on burner-phone calls to recently widowed elderly victims.
PAA lone, unidentified hacker jailbroke Anthropic's Claude Code coding agent with a fake "authorized bug bounty/pentest" pretext and paired it.
PAA retired New Jersey man lost $390,000 in two days after a fake Norton/PayPal refund call escalated into a bogus PNC "mistaken deposit" story that had him.
PATejay Fletcher founded and ran iSpoof, a Bitcoin-subscription caller-ID spoofing and OTP-interception platform that let fraudsters impersonate bank.
PATo unmask a boardroom leaker, HP's leak investigators and their hired data brokers impersonated directors and journalists to trick phone carriers.
PAGoogle's Threat Intelligence Group disclosed PROMPTFLUX, a VBScript dropper that calls the Gemini API mid-execution to have an LLM rewrite.
PARussian GRU-linked Forest Blizzard (APT28/Fancy Bear) used OpenAI's GPT-4-family LLM services to research satellite communication protocols and radar.
PABetween 2006 and 2008 the FTC sued 16 data-broker and private-investigation defendants who pretexted telecom carriers.
PAFTC's December 2024 Data Spotlight quantified an explosion in "task scams," gamified job-offer frauds launched via unsolicited text/WhatsApp messages.
PAIn the first-ever prosecutions under the federal anti-pretexting statute Congress passed after the 2006 HP boardroom spying scandal.
PAIn June 2025 the DOJ filed a civil forfeiture complaint against more than $225.3M in Tether (USDT) traced to a global pig-butchering money-laundering.
PAA Dominican Republic call-center network ran a multi-role "grandparent"/"family-in-need-of-bail" scam: openers posed as a distressed grandchild.
PAAn unrelated MHRA search warrant found care-home patient prescription and NHS records rotting in unlocked crates and bin bags at a London pharmacy.
PADOJ/FTC alleged that Citizens Disability and subsidiary CD Media made 109 million-plus illegal telemarketing calls.
PAA caller posing as two different Clorox employees talked Cognizant's outsourced IT help desk into resetting their passwords and MFA (including the SMS-MFA.
PAA long-running, India-based network of call centres impersonated the Canada Revenue Agency and RCMP in mass vishing calls that threatened tens.
PADOJ/IRS-CI unsealed four indictments charging 28 members of a Chinese organized-crime money-laundering ring tied to India-based "mistaken refund".
PAThe FTC's first-ever case under the FACTA Disposal Rule: a Northbrook, Illinois mortgage lender repeatedly dumped intact customer credit reports.
The PG and E utility shutoff barcode payment scam, the Southern California Edison disconnection threat scam, the Phantom Hacker scheme impersonating Bank of America in Chicago, and the FTC pretexting sweep against telephone record sellers all used a fake official notice or agency call to pressure a quick payment or handover of information.
The Roger Roger Costa Rica sweepstakes call center bilked hundreds of elderly victims out of more than four million dollars, a New Jersey scheme targeted elderly widows and widowers over life-insurance beneficiary claims, a Dominican Republic ring ran an attorney and police impersonation grandparent scam, and DOJ and IRS-CI unsealed a 65 million dollar mistaken-refund elder-fraud indictment against a 28-member money-laundering ring.
Kevin Mitnick posed as Novell tech support to steal NetWare source code, the Hewlett-Packard boardroom spying scandal used pretexting to obtain directors phone records, the Clorox and Cognizant help-desk breach relied on a fabricated identity to reset credentials, and the iSpoof caller-ID spoofing-as-a-service platform sold the fake caller identities that made these pretexts believable.
The Susie Wiles AI voice impersonation used a hacked contact list, a Singapore businessman lost nearly five million dollars to a deepfake Zoom call impersonating Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, a single operator weaponized Claude Code and GPT-4.1 to breach nine Mexican government agencies, and Forest Blizzard used GPT-4 for satellite and radar reconnaissance.
Social Engineering Examples