Smishing is phishing delivered by text message, usually spoofing a delivery notice, toll bill, or bank alert to get a victim to click a link and enter payment or login details on a fake page. The cases here include mass phishing-as-a-service kits distributed to thousands of targets at once, not just one-off scam texts.
Scheme participants posed as veteran finance professionals inside private WhatsApp investment groups to lure at least 18 U.S. retail investors into a fake crypto trading platform, NanoBit, wiring over $2 million to Hong Kong before the SEC secured a $5.5 million default judgment in one of its first pig-butchering enforcement actions.
SMCensys researchers used passive DNS to unravel a live USPS/UPS "package awaiting action" smishing operation, exposing 682 rotating lookalike hostnames behind a WebSocket-based backend that streamed victims' card data in real time and included an operator kill-switch, a concrete technical case of the package-delivery smishing wave USPS itself had flagged as rising in June 2025.
SMAn unidentified impersonator used an AI-cloned voice and a hacked personal-contacts list to pose as White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, texting and calling senators, governors and business leaders with requests including a pardon list and a cash transfer, triggering an FBI investigation.
SMA mass SMS phishing campaign impersonating dozens of U.S. toll agencies spoofed 'unpaid toll' notices to harvest payment card and personal data, drawing 2,000+ FBI complaints within weeks of an April 2024 IC3 alert and continuing into 2025; the underlying 'Lighthouse' phishing kit was targeted by a Google civil lawsuit in November 2025.
SMA caller posing as a Standard Bank representative persuaded 18-year-old Reabetswe Modisane to move her R438,900 education trust fund to a "safe" Capitec account, with three transfers completed within 20 minutes; Standard Bank's own investigation attributed the loss to vishing while denying any breach of its systems, and the case has been escalated to the National Financial Ombud and North West police.
SMA 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 AI-generated Zoom "government meeting" that appeared to feature PM Lawrence Wong and other senior officials.
SMA smishing text plus a follow-up phone call using a deepfaked colleague's voice tricked a Retool employee into surrendering MFA codes, letting attackers exploit Google Authenticator cloud sync to take over 27 crypto customer accounts and steal ~$15M.
SMA Pune CFO wired Rs 56 lakh after a Microsoft Teams message impersonating her Italian CEO's name and photo demanded an urgent transfer, then caught the fraud only when a follow-up Rs 1.5 crore ask prompted her to call the real CEO.
SMFraudsters hijacked a WhatsApp account via a malicious ZIP file, swapped in their own number while keeping the real display photo of former Rajya Sabha MP Naresh Gujral, and impersonated him to his company's finance staff to push through four RTGS transfers totaling Rs 7.68 crore before Delhi Police froze roughly Rs 4.28 crore and arrested one mule-account holder.
SMA single compromised Microsoft employee account gave LAPSUS$ (DEV-0537) "limited access" to an Azure DevOps repository, from which the group exfiltrated and publicly leaked roughly 37GB of partial source code for Bing, Bing Maps, and Cortana in March 2022, part of a wider spree in which the group used MFA push-bombing, SIM swaps, and paid-for insider MFA approvals to breach well-defended tech companies.
SMA trusted, decades-respected Kansas community bank CEO was groomed over WhatsApp into a crypto "pig butchering" scam, then embezzled $47.1 million in bank wires (on top of stealing from his church, an investment club, and his own daughter) trying to chase fake returns, collapsing Heartland Tri-State Bank and drawing a 293-month federal sentence.
SMFTC's December 2024 Data Spotlight quantified an explosion in "task scams," gamified job-offer frauds launched via unsolicited text/WhatsApp messages, showing reports quadrupled from about 5,000 in 2023 to an estimated 20,000 in just the first half of 2024, with total job-scam losses hitting $223 million in H1 2024 alone.
SMA US Attorney's Office (EDVA) court order seized seven domains spoofing the Singapore International Monetary Exchange that pig-butchering scammers used to defraud five US victims of over $10 million after grooming them via dating apps, social media, and messaging platforms.
SMDOJ/IRS-CI unsealed four indictments charging 28 members of a Chinese organized-crime money-laundering ring tied to India-based "mistaken refund" call-center scams that stole $65 million from thousands of US seniors, cracking the case partly with help from YouTube scambaiters who filmed and identified key money mules.
SMA Taiwan-linked money courier was caught in an Austin bank sting after helping collect part of the $1,408,850 a local victim lost over six months to a "pig butchering" romance-investment scam run through the LINE app and a fake "DAIQ" crypto trading platform.
Social Engineering Examples