Social engineering incidents
277 entries spanning 1995 to 2026. Filter by how the attacker reached the human, what it cost, and whether AI was involved.
Bribed overseas support agents leaked Coinbase data; $20M extortion refused
Coinbase · United States
Coinbase disclosed on May 15, 2025 that criminals had bribed a small group of overseas customer support agents, based in India, to pull customer data from its support systems. The data was used to run social engineering attacks against Coinbase customers. The attackers demanded $20 million on May 11 to suppress the breach; Coinbase refused and posted a $20 million reward instead. The breach originated on December 26, 2024, and a Maine Attorney General filing put the affected total at 69,461 people.
Mailchimp staff social-engineered; Trezor newsletter used to phish wallet seeds
SatoshiLabs (Trezor), via email provider Mailchimp · Czech Republic
Attackers ran a social engineering attack against Mailchimp employees to reach an internal customer support tool, then used it to pull mailing lists from cryptocurrency-sector accounts including Trezor's. Phishing emails sent from a lookalike domain, noreply@trezor.us, told recipients that Trezor had suffered a breach and instructed them to install a new version of Trezor Suite. The fake application, including a convincing web version, prompted victims to connect their wallets and enter their recovery seed phrase.
Vishing of GoDaddy staff hijacked domains of crypto firms Liquid and NiceHash
GoDaddy (registrar); Liquid.com and NiceHash · United States
Attackers social-engineered a small number of GoDaddy employees into transferring control of domains belonging to at least six cryptocurrency businesses, including Liquid.com and NiceHash. With registrar-level control they altered DNS records, which for Liquid gave them access to internal email accounts and document storage. GoDaddy confirmed the social engineering and said the affected accounts were locked down. It followed a similar March 2020 voice-phishing incident at the same registrar.
Entry types: Incident, Campaign, Benchmark. Aggregate agency statistics are kept as benchmarks and are never summed into the counters. Methodology. Machine-readable version of this page: global-social-engineering-impact-da.vercel.app/api/incidents?q=Unattributed.