BizSugar.com › Finance › Privacy Protection: Pretexting Can Collapse Your Finances

By Joy Mali

“Pretexting” is basically an elaborate lie concocted to make a person give up his/her valuable financial information. Wikipedia defines it as: “the act of creating and using an invented scenario (the pretext) to engage a targeted victim in a manner that increases the chance the victim will divulge information or perform actions that would be unlikely in ordinary circumstances.”

ZDNet, on the other hand, defines pretexting as “misrepresenting your identity to gain access to privileged information.” For AllThingsD, pretexting means a “fancy word for impersonating a person to try and get access to their cellphone billing records” while in the UK, pretexting is also known as “blagging” or “bohoing.”