Vishing swaps the email for a phone call: an attacker posing as an employee, IT support, or a bank representative talks a target into resetting a password, approving an MFA push, or moving money. It's harder to filter than email and easier to make convincing under time pressure, which is why help-desk vishing has become one of the costliest attack paths for large enterprises.
A fraudster spoofed Wells Fargo's real 800 number nine minutes after a legitimate advisor call, phished a 2FA code from customer Alice Fries, and a Wells Fargo representative then knowingly overrode the bank's own $50,000 wire-review threshold to release a $100,000 fraudulent wire, per a Los Angeles lawsuit built partly on the bank's own recorded verification call.
VIThe CEO of a UK energy firm was tricked into wiring €220,000 (~$243,000) to a Hungarian account in March 2019 after a phone call using AI-cloned audio of his German parent company's own CEO's voice, marking the first widely reported criminal use of AI voice-cloning technology, disclosed by insurer Euler Hermes.
VIA 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.
VIA Singaporean finance professional in her 50s lost S$1.2 million (~US$900,000) over two months after scammers impersonating an Anti-Scam Centre officer and then police "Inspector Chong" convinced her she was linked to money laundering, coaching her to lie to the real Anti-Scam Centre and extracting funds via bank transfers and four in-person cash handoffs.
VIA 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.
VIA Snap Inc. payroll employee emailed the W-2 and payroll data of roughly 700 current and former employees to an attacker who spoofed CEO Evan Spiegel's identity, part of a nationwide spring-2016 wave of spoofed-executive W-2 phishing that prompted an IRS public alert.
VISABRIC's own Annual Crime Statistics reports document a sustained, industry-wide surge in vishing- and SIM-swap-driven digital banking fraud across South Africa's major banks: digital banking losses rose from roughly R1.08bn (2023, including R625.7m in banking-app fraud alone) to R1.888bn (2024, +74%), with SABRIC explicitly attributing the rise to social engineering rather than technical hacks, while a widely circulated "R3.9bn in 2025" figure and claim of a single four-bank joint alert could not be verified against any primary SABRIC or bank source.
VITwo Scottish small businesses, an unnamed Perth firm in 2019 and Dumfries-based Handmade Craft House in 2026, lost £31,000 and over £5,000 respectively after callers impersonating bank fraud-team staff talked owners into "safeguarding" money by transferring it straight to the scammers.
VITwo Quebec fraudsters acting as courier and driver for an AI-voice-cloned "grandchild in crisis" vishing scheme that defrauded Saskatchewan seniors of tens of thousands of dollars were sentenced in Regina provincial court, with the judge explicitly finding AI was used to mimic victims' grandchildren's voices and calling lead defendant Ciprian Teodor "the human face of an otherwise faceless, AI-driven fraud."
VIA 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.
VIA Pakistani national in Sydney allegedly ran a callback-vishing scheme impersonating Optus and TPG Telecom support, tricking 100+ Australians into receiving "maintenance"/upgrade-related SMS one-time PINs that he intercepted to fraudulently buy and reroute high-end phones for offshore resale, netting more than AUD $1 million in seized cash before his November 2024 arrest.
VIA scammer spoofed a New Zealand bank's real phone number, posed as its fraud team, and talked a customer into reading out authentication codes for a fake "safe account" transfer, stealing NZD 30,000 before the Banking Ombudsman recommended the bank reimburse her in full plus costs.
VIFraudsters 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.
VIAn Atlantic City woman posed as a life-insurance/retirement-benefit representative on burner-phone calls to recently widowed elderly victims, telling them their late spouse's policy was "in arrears" and draining over $100,000 from them via prepaid gift cards, while separately hiding that income to keep collecting SSI, Medicaid, and HUD housing assistance.
VINTS IT Care used fake Microsoft/Apple security pop-ups to scare consumers, mostly older Americans, into calling a rigged India-based support line that sold bogus multi-year tech-support packages, resulting in a $4.9M FTC judgment plus a separate DOJ criminal conviction that sent CEO Jagmeet Singh Virk to prison.
VIA 16-member Colombian crime ring called and WhatsApp-messaged bank customers posing as fraud-prevention officers, talked mostly over-50 victims into sharing their phone screens, and drained COP 1.685 billion from 94 people across 10 departments before a joint Fiscalia-Policia Nacional operation captured the group, including alleged leader alias "Ralf."
VIA roughly ten-minute phone call impersonating an MGM employee to the IT help desk let Scattered Spider reset MFA, seize identity-system control, and trigger an outage MGM valued at about $100 million.
VIA retired 60-year-old Malaysian bank manager in Johor Baru lost RM936,000 (life savings) after a Macau-scam vishing syndicate posing successively as an insurance agent, a police officer, and a deputy public prosecutor convinced her to open a new bank account, transfer her savings into it, and hand over her online banking credentials "for investigation," only for the funds to be drained before she discovered the theft on 15 May 2026.
VIPosing as NatWest bank security, vishing criminals exploited a landline callback delay to convince Surrey solicitor Karen Mackie to wire £734,000 of client money to "safe" accounts, costing her nearly £512,000 unrecovered, her legal career, and ultimately her home and solvency.
VIA 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 wire his savings to a gold dealer and collect the coins in person, while bank and dealer staff watched him stay on the phone the whole time.
VIFraudsters impersonating Leoni AG's senior executives tricked the German cable manufacturer's Romanian subsidiary finance team into wiring roughly EUR 40 million (about US$44.6 million) to attacker-controlled accounts in August 2016.
VIJLR's five-week production halt and record £1.9bn UK economic hit were first blamed on helpdesk-vishing by a criminal collective calling itself "Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters", but a June 2026 New York Times investigation, backed by JLR's own then-CISO, instead points to Russian hackers who exploited aging technology and deployed novel ransomware, with no social engineering involved, plus a separate, earlier and unrelated intrusion by a Jordanian hacker.
VIDOJ's first-of-its-kind nationwide takedown charged 61 defendants and five Ahmedabad, India call-center conglomerates for a 2012-2016 IRS/USCIS impersonation vishing scheme that threatened over 15,000 U.S. victims with arrest or deportation to extort payment via prepaid cards and wires.
VIFraudsters 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, netting roughly £800,000 after partial recovery and triggering a club lawsuit against the bank over its duty of care.
VIDOJ unsealed indictments and won guilty pleas, prison terms, and multimillion-dollar restitution against FIN7 (Carbanak Group) members Fedir Hladyr, Andrii Kolpakov, and Denys Iarmak: the authoritative government case documenting the group's fake "Combi Security" recruitment front and its later mailed-USB (BadUSB) baiting campaigns against 100+ U.S. companies.
VIA single vishing call impersonating Carnival's own IT security team convinced an employee to hand over credentials, giving an unauthorized actor a foothold that led to the theft of personal data on nearly 6 million people.
VIA long-running, India-based network of call centres impersonated the Canada Revenue Agency and RCMP in mass vishing calls that threatened tens of thousands of Canadians with arrest or deportation over fake tax debts, stealing tens of millions of dollars before RCMP's Project OCTAVIA and Indian police raids on roughly 39-40 call centres, plus Canadian money-mule prosecutions, disrupted the operation.
VIDOJ/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.
VIA 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 deepfakes.
VIAttackers 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 fake $459.90 Windows Defender billing notice with fraud callback numbers, which a human SOC reviewer cleared as a false positive.
VIFraudsters spoofed Barclays' real phone number and hold music, posed as the bank's fraud team in a two-caller vishing script, and talked a 70-something UK jeweller into installing AnyDesk on his business PC, draining GBP 48,451.78 from two accounts before solicitors clawed back GBP 25,650 from the bank.
VIAttackers phoned Twitter employees posing as IT help desk, harvested VPN credentials, and used internal admin tools to hijack 130 high-profile accounts for a "double your bitcoin" scam.
Social Engineering Examples