Socially engineered basketball game

This is one interesting news, I read today.

It was a kind of crucial NCAA basketball match-up between Univ. of California(Cal) and USC. USC is headed by their All-Pac-10 guard Gabe Pruitt. Interestingly, a few days before this match, Pruitt had a conversation over IM with a girl who claimed that she was Victoria, studying in UCLA. The chat went on so well that Pruitt decided to meet Victoria after the match-up.

Surprizingly to Pruitt, that "Victoria" had many friends in Cal, so she simply shared the entire IM conversation with them. The IM conversation was printed out and seemingly circulated among the audience of this match. The conversation contained, a "lot" of details including Pruitt's digits.

When Pruitt stood in the free throw line, he heard somebody in the crowd shouting something familiar to him - his digits. Crowd started chanting "Victoria, victoria". Pruitt apparently got embaressed. A normal 79% free-throw shooter ended up with 3/13.

This is a perfect example of how social engineering works - a very clever work. Poor USC lost the match. No idea whether the alleged "Victoria" visited the match.