Documented social engineering incidents targeting the professional & business services 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.
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.
ConfirmedAdvance Machine Company's West Coast sales manager repeatedly rifled Tennant Company's sealed, covered dumpster in California to steal sales leads.
ConfirmedA Pennsylvania shredding-business owner's 2010 qui tam suit alleged that Shred-It, Iron Mountain.
ConfirmedA federal grand jury in Columbia, South Carolina indicted 12 people on 12 counts (conspiracy, wire fraud, bank fraud.
ConfirmedCosta Rica-based ringleader Roger Roger used spoofed government caller ID to convince hundreds of elderly victims they had won sweepstakes prizes.
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.
ConfirmedBetween 2006 and 2008 the FTC sued 16 data-broker and private-investigation defendants who pretexted telecom carriers.
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.
ConfirmedDOJ/FTC alleged that Citizens Disability and subsidiary CD Media made 109 million-plus illegal telemarketing calls.
ConfirmedToronto podcast-analytics company CoHost spent two months and seven interview rounds with a candidate later revealed as an AI-fabricated persona whose.
ConfirmedA finance employee in Arup's Hong Kong office wired HK$200M (~US$25.6M) after a video conference in which the CFO and colleagues were all AI-generated.
ConfirmedAttackers stood up a real Azure subscription and Azure Monitor alert rule to make Microsoft's own mail servers send a fully SPF/DKIM/DMARC-authenticated.
ConfirmedAir Canada admitted in a sworn Ontario Superior Court affidavit that it hired private investigators who twice took trash from outside WestJet co-founder.
Social Engineering Examples