Social engineering is persuading people in order to take an action that they wouldn’t normally take. This is a very broad term, but for the purpose of this site, it will refer to people coercing others to divulge personal information and payment information. Other forms of scams were covered in this site that are considered to be social engineering, those being phishing and phone scams. Unlike those two, however, social engineering isn’t through any specific medium and can even be in person.
It can be difficult to avoid social engineering, as many forms of social engineering rely on people wanting to help others. A key example is calls where scammers claim that a loved one has been put in prison, and that the victim needs to pay the bail. This leverages most people’s desires to help their loved ones, and also has the appearance of a stressful situation, which can be even more convincing for people. These attempts are even more prevalent today thanks to the rise of AI, where the scammer will make an AI voice to imitate a familiar person and use that to coerce payment.
In-person social engineering is rare, but it does happen. An example could be someone coming into your workplace and saying they are with your IT team and need your computer password. You might be encouraged to give them the password, especially because they said they are IT. The best way to social engineering is to be cautious and always double-check someone is who they say they are.