Documented cases attributed to unaffiliated individual threat actors, sourced and fact-checked.
A Chinese national talked her way past three layers of Mar-a-Lago's Secret Service and club-staff checkpoints using a false pool visit and an unverified.
ConfirmedVidoc Security Lab, a Polish-founded, US-headquartered cybersecurity startup.
ConfirmedFugitive hacker Kevin Mitnick impersonated a vacationing Novell employee on a "top-secret" project.
ConfirmedAn Atlantic City woman posed as a life-insurance/retirement-benefit representative on burner-phone calls to recently widowed elderly victims.
ConfirmedA lone, unidentified hacker jailbroke Anthropic's Claude Code coding agent with a fake "authorized bug bounty/pentest" pretext and paired it.
ConfirmedA 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.
ConfirmedA Tennessee school district's finance director wired $3.36M in state education funds to fraudsters impersonating textbook vendor Pearson from a look-alike.
ConfirmedA low-skill UK-based cybercriminal used Claude to write the encryption, evasion, and anti-recovery code it could not build itself.
ConfirmedA Telegram/dark-web "blackhat ChatGPT" sold $200/month subscriptions promising AI-generated phishing pages, malware and BEC lures.
ConfirmedIn the first-ever prosecutions under the federal anti-pretexting statute Congress passed after the 2006 HP boardroom spying scandal.
ConfirmedToronto podcast-analytics company CoHost spent two months and seven interview rounds with a candidate later revealed as an AI-fabricated persona whose.
ConfirmedA single cybercriminal used Anthropic's Claude Code as an autonomous operator to breach ~17 organizations and generate psychologically targeted.
ConfirmedAttackers phoned Twitter employees posing as IT help desk, harvested VPN credentials.
Social Engineering Examples