Social Engineering Explained: The Tactics Scammers Use to Fool People

In early 2024, a finance employee at a multinational company joined a video call with colleagues she recognized, including what appeared to be the company’s CFO. After the meeting, she wired $25 million to an account as instructed. The people on the call were deepfakes. Not one real colleague had been present.^[1]

No firewall stopped this attack. No antivirus caught it. The target was a person, not a machine.

That is how social engineering attacks work in their modern form. It is not about breaking into systems. It is about convincing people to do what the attacker wants. And social engineering attacks are behind the majority of successful cyberattacks today.

It’s Not About Hacking Technology, It’s About Hacking People

Social engineering is the use of deception, manipulation, and psychological pressure to trick people into revealing sensitive information, transferring money, or granting access. The technology involved is secondary. The real target is trust.

According to the Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report, 68% of breaches involved a non-malicious human element: someone who made a mistake or was deceived.^[2] Attackers know this. It is often faster and cheaper to manipulate a person than to crack a well-secured system.

Social engineering was the top initial access vector in incident response cases between May 2024 and May 2025, accounting for 36% of all incidents investigated.^[3] The numbers reflect a clear pattern: when attackers want in, they go after people first.

Understanding what these attacks look like in practice is the first step toward recognizing them.

Phishing

An attacker sends a convincing email designed to get the recipient to click a link, enter login credentials, or download a file. The emails increasingly look legitimate, mimicking real companies, real formatting, and real language.

Pretexting

Now the most common social engineering action according to the 2024 DBIR, pretexting overtook phishing for the first time.^[2] An attacker builds a false scenario to establish trust, posing as an IT technician who needs your credentials to resolve a ticket, or as a company auditor who needs to verify financial details.

Business Email Compromise (BEC)

This targets employees with access to money or sensitive data. Attackers impersonate executives, vendors, or internal accounts, often after monitoring real email exchanges, and instruct staff to wire funds or share information. The FBI received 21,442 BEC complaints in 2024 with losses totaling $2.77 billion.^[4]

Vishing

Voice phishing. Scammers call targets directly, often impersonating IT support, banks, or government agencies. Vishing attacks surged 442% in the second half of 2024 compared to the first half of the year.^[5]

Smishing

Text-based attacks sent via SMS. A message claiming to be your bank, your carrier, or a delivery service drops a malicious link or asks you to call a fraudulent number.

ClickFix

Users are shown fake browser alerts or software prompts that instruct them to run a command or download a fix, delivering malware in the process. This tactic is increasingly common.

These are not exotic attack methods. They are happening every day to businesses of all sizes.

Why These Attacks Work

The tactics above succeed because they target human behavior, not software. Attackers are skilled at pulling specific psychological levers.

Authority

When someone believes they are responding to a manager, an IT administrator, or a law enforcement officer, they tend to comply without questioning the legitimacy of the request. Attackers impersonate these figures deliberately because authority is one of the most reliable triggers.

Urgency

A message that demands action within an hour, warns of account suspension, or references an overdue wire transfer creates panic. Panic short-circuits the careful thinking that would otherwise catch the scam.

Fear

Threats of legal action, lost access, or exposed data push victims to act before they verify. The point is to keep the target moving, not thinking.

Familiarity

Sophisticated attackers research their targets. They know real employee names, real vendor relationships, and real internal processes. When a request references information only an insider would know, the victim’s guard drops.

The median time for a user to fall for a phishing email is under 60 seconds.^[2] The attacks are designed to prevent the pause that would otherwise reveal the deception.

The tactics described above are not new. What is new is how much better they have become.

More than 82.6% of phishing emails analyzed between September 2024 and February 2025 used AI in some form.^[5] AI removes the typos, the awkward phrasing, and the grammatical errors that once made phishing messages easier to catch. AI-generated phishing emails outperformed human-written control emails by 42% in click-through testing.^[5]

Voice cloning has made vishing far more dangerous. Attackers can now generate a convincing voice replica using as little as 20 to 30 seconds of audio, enough to clone an executive, a colleague, or a bank representative and use that voice in a live call.^[6] Deepfake-enabled vishing grew by over 1,600% in the first quarter of 2025 alone.^[6]

Humans are not well-equipped to detect this. Studies show people correctly identify AI-generated deepfakes only about 55 to 60% of the time, barely better than chance.^[6] Automated detection systems are not much better, experiencing significant accuracy drops when tested against real-world conditions.

The $25 million deepfake wire transfer described at the opening of this post was not an isolated event. It reflects where this threat is heading.

Why Small Businesses Are Targets Too

Social engineering attacks are not limited to large corporations. Small organizations with 1 to 50 employees represent 55.8% of ransomware targets.^[7]

Smaller businesses tend to have less formal procedures: fewer layers of approval, less dedicated IT security, and often no out-of-band verification process for financial requests. An attacker impersonating a vendor or executive at a small business may never encounter a second set of eyes on a transaction. The average business faces over 700 social engineering attempts per year, and the average attack costs $130,000.^[7]

For professional services firms like accounting practices, law firms, and financial advisors, the risk is compounded. These businesses handle client funds, sensitive records, and regular wire transfers, making them attractive BEC targets. But any business in Beaver Dam, Fond du Lac, Watertown, or the surrounding area that sends invoices, processes payroll, or holds customer data has something an attacker wants.

What Your Business Can Do Right Now

The good news is that practical defenses exist, and most of them come down to process and awareness rather than expensive technology.

Train Employees Regularly

Security awareness training that covers real attack scenarios, not just a once-a-year compliance checkbox, measurably reduces susceptibility. Employees who understand what urgency manipulation looks like, what pretexting sounds like, and what to do when a request feels off are much harder to fool.

Establish Verification Procedures

Any financial transfer, password reset, or sensitive data request should require independent verification through a known, trusted channel. Call back on a number you already have, not one provided in the message or call.

Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Even when attackers obtain credentials through phishing, MFA creates an additional barrier to account access.

Use Email Filtering and DNS Protection

Automated tools catch a significant portion of phishing attempts before they reach an inbox. They are not foolproof, but they reduce the volume of attacks your team has to evaluate manually.

Run Simulated Phishing Tests

Testing your employees with controlled phishing simulations shows where training gaps exist and gives staff low-stakes practice recognizing attacks.

Build a Reporting Culture

Employees who feel safe reporting suspicious calls or messages, without fear of being blamed for nearly clicking, help your business catch attacks early. Early reporting often limits the damage.

These defenses work together as layers. No single measure stops everything, but combined they raise the cost and difficulty of a successful attack significantly.

You Don’t Have to Figure This Out Alone

Social engineering is evolving faster than most small businesses can track. The tactics change, the tools improve, and the targets shift. Staying ahead of it is an ongoing effort, not a one-time fix.

Inter-Quest’s cybersecurity services help businesses in Beaver Dam and surrounding communities build layered defenses, including email filtering, MFA implementation, security awareness training, and ongoing monitoring. As part of our managed IT support, we work with you to make sure the human side of your security posture is as strong as your technical defenses.

If you want to understand where your business stands, reach out to us. A conversation costs nothing, and knowing your exposure is always worth it.