Manipulation techniques used to trick people into revealing confidential information.
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Please find the attached document for your attention and consideration. Kindly provide the requested quotation at your earliest convenience. Five polite sentences, a one-word subject and no attachment: a quotation request that names no product, no company and no person, sent from a Gmail account to itself with the recipient blind-copied.
You have been randomly selected to receive a €4,500,000 donation. A Cantonese-language donation fraud signed in the name of a real German research foundation, sent from a Rio de Janeiro fire brigade's government mailbox, and routing replies to a misspelled Gmail address.
This is a official email. We are the Domain Registration Service company in Shanghai, China. The Chinese domain name registration scam, back for the third time in our archive, sent from a nine-month-old domain with the same phone numbers and the same Shanghai address as the version we dissected in June 2024.
I am MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos. A Chinese-language donation fraud promising USD 100,800,000 through a foundation that does not exist, sent from a German online shop's info mailbox under a subject line that is only Re:.
Please I'm consulting you for my personal investment plan. An advance-fee approach signed in the name of Ukraine's First Lady, sent from a car dealership's mailbox at a UAE internet provider, asking you to reply to a Gmail address.
You have Two (2) Messages Pending Delivery on Your E-mail Portal. A notice claiming to be your own domain's web administrator, sent from an animal-feed company's accounts mailbox, whose button opens a page the attacker uploaded into a Google Cloud Storage bucket.
Your payment has been successfully processed. Please find the attached SWIFT advice and supporting documentation for your records. Four lines of flawless business English, a Re: subject line for a conversation that never happened, and a 140 KB PDF that is the entire attack.
We couldn't renew your Cloud storage subscription because your payment method needs to be updated. A storage-full warning whose body is actually about a failed payment, sent from a domain on a top-level domain that does not exist, linking to a page parked inside a Google Cloud Storage bucket.
A firm in Germany needs a supplier of extracted materials from India for production in there plant. The same sender, the same dummy recipient, nineteen hours later, with every phrase swapped for a synonym.
Our firm in Germany needs a supplier of extracts materials from India, reply for details. Fifteen words, no company name, no signature, sent from a free Polish mailbox to somebody else's address.
