9 Ways to Train Employees to Prevent Phishing Scams

Most security teams still ask the wrong question. They ask whether someone finished the training. The question that actually predicts a breach is different: how likely is this specific person, on this specific channel, to be attacked this week and would they catch it?

That distinction is the difference between a compliance program and one that actually moves the needle. Phishing remains the most common way attackers get in: it was the initial access vector in 16% of confirmed breaches in Verizon's 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, and the human element such as someone clicking, replying, or approving something they shouldn't have, showed up in 62% of all breaches. Attackers have also stopped confining themselves to email. Verizon's data shows mobile-centric attacks, voice calls, and text messages now succeed at a click rate 40% higher than email phishing.

This guide covers what phishing scams actually are, how they work today, and nine ways to train employees to prevent them, including the AI-generated and deepfake attacks that most training programs still aren't built for.

What Are Phishing Scams?

A phishing scam is any attempt to trick someone into handing over credentials, money, or sensitive information by impersonating a trusted person or system. 

That impersonation used to mean a sloppy email with a fake link. It no longer does. IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report found phishing-initiated breaches cost organizations an average of $4.8 million, and attackers now run these scams across email, text message, voice calls, and, increasingly, real-time video.

The mechanics haven't changed much: create urgency, borrow authority, ask for something small and reasonable-sounding. What's changed is the production quality. Generative AI has made a flawless, well-researched lure as cheap to produce as a lazy one, which is why pattern-matching training like "watch for typos and weird links" stopped being sufficient a while ago.

How Phishing Scams Work

A phishing scam typically follows a sequence, not a single message. Attackers research a target (often from LinkedIn or a company's own public materials), establish a pretext that fits that person's role, and then push for action under time pressure such as a wire transfer, a password reset, a credential entered into a fake login page.

Examples of Phishing Scams

The scenarios below are illustrative composites, not accounts of specific real incidents, but each reflects a pattern that shows up constantly in reported breaches.

A typical smishing-to-vishing scenario

Here’s what a smishing-to-vishing scenario looks like: An employee gets a text that looks like it's from the company's IT help desk: "We've flagged unusual sign-in activity on your account. Call this number right away if this wasn't you." Worried, they call. The person who answers already knows their name, department, and manager, all pulled from a public LinkedIn profile, and walks them through a "security verification" that's really just harvesting their password and a one-time MFA code. Ten minutes later, the attacker is inside the company VPN. No malware, no suspicious link,  just a text used as bait and a phone call doing the actual social engineering.

A convincing invoice scam

An accounts payable employee gets an email from a vendor the company has worked with for years, complete with matching logo, past invoice formatting, and even a reply from someone using the vendor contact's real name. The email says the vendor has switched banks and asks that this month's payment go to a new account. Nothing about the email looks off, because it was AI-generated from that vendor's own public correspondence and past invoices leaked in an earlier, unrelated breach. The employee updates the payment details and sends the wire before the real vendor calls, confused, asking where their payment is.

A deepfake video call

A finance manager gets a message from someone who appears to be their CEO, asking to hop on a quick video call about an urgent, confidential acquisition. On the call, the "CEO" and two "board members" look and sound exactly right. It’s generated from clips of real earnings calls and conference talks, all public. They ask for a same-day wire to close the deal before it leaks to the press. The manager, on camera with people who look and sound like leadership, transfers the funds without a second channel of verification.

Why Most Phishing Scam Training Doesn't Work

The standard model like one course a year, maybe a simulated email or two, treats phishing prevention like a certification to check off rather than a skill to build. That model has three specific problems.

It doesn't match how skill actually forms. Knowledge fades fast without repetition, so whatever an employee absorbed in January is largely gone by the time a real attack lands in October. Annual training optimizes for a completion rate, not a change in behavior.

It only covers email. Employees are trained to scrutinize a suspicious link, but nobody's told them what a vishing call sounds like or what a deepfaked colleague on a video call implies. Given how much of the current attack volume is happening off email now, that's a wide, uncovered surface.

It measures the wrong thing. Completion rates and quiz scores tell you who showed up. They tell you nothing about whether the organization is actually harder to attack than it was last quarter, which is the number that matters to a board or an insurer.

None of this means training is pointless. It means most training is built around a security awareness training (SAT) model that’s periodic, email-only, completion-scored, and was built for a threat landscape that no longer exists.

9 Ways to Train Employees to Prevent Phishing Scams

1. Replace the annual course with continuous, adaptive practice

A single yearly training event is a cram session, and cram sessions don't build durable skill. Employees need short, frequent touchpoints, closer to weekly than annual, with difficulty that rises as their skill does. Continuous practice is what separates a program that changes behavior from one that just satisfies an audit.

2. Simulate every channel attackers actually use

Email-only simulations train employees to be good at defending against exactly one channel. Effective programs run simulations across email, SMS (smishing), and voice calls (vishing), because that's where attackers have already moved. If your simulation platform can't test a phone call, it's testing less than half the real threat.

3. Train specifically against AI-generated and deepfake phishing

Generic phishing training doesn't transfer to deepfake attacks, because the tells are completely different such as a cloned voice sounding too perfect, a synthesized face on a video call looking right. Preventing this requires training built on the specific patterns of AI-generated scams: urgency paired with a request to bypass normal verification, a "colleague" on a call who won't get on an unscheduled second call to confirm. Employees need exposure to what these attacks actually feel like before they meet one live, and simulations should be refreshed as generation techniques change, since a static library of deepfake examples goes stale fast.

4. Personalize by role and exposure, not just seniority

A finance employee who can approve wire transfers faces a different threat than a new hire in marketing. Effective programs weigh simulation frequency and difficulty by what someone actually has access to and how visible they are externally, not by a flat, org-wide schedule.

5. Coach in the moment, not in a follow-up module

When someone clicks a simulated phishing link, the highest-value moment for learning is right then, not two weeks later in a scheduled remedial course. Short, specific, non-punitive coaching delivered at the point of failure sticks in a way a generic follow-up module doesn't.

6. Make reporting effortless and blame-free

If flagging a suspicious message takes more effort than deleting it, most people will delete it. A one-click reporting option, paired with a culture that doesn't punish people for reporting a false alarm, turns employees into an early-warning system instead of a liability to manage around.

7. Extend simulations to where people actually work

Attackers increasingly use the tools employees already trust, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other collaboration platforms, exactly because those channels don't carry the same built-in suspicion as an external email. Training that only lives in a separate LMS misses the environment where a growing share of social engineering is happening.

8. Get leadership included, not exempted

Executives are disproportionately targeted because of the access and authority they carry, which is exactly what made the Arup deepfake work. A program that quietly excuses leadership from simulations leaves the highest-value targets in the organization untested.

9. Extend the same model to the AI agents your employees run

This is the piece most training programs haven't caught up to yet. Employees increasingly delegate work to AI agents, such as connecting them to tools, pointing them at repositories, and letting them act with real permissions. An agent inherits the exposure of the person who configured it, and it can be manipulated by a paragraph of untrusted text the same way a person can be manipulated by a phone call. Preventing phishing scams increasingly means mapping and testing that delegated exposure too, not just the human inbox.

How to Measure Whether Your Phishing Prevention Training Is Working

Completion rates answer "did people show up." They don't answer whether your organization is actually harder to attack. Track these instead:

• Reporting rate: the share of simulated (and real) phishing attempts employees actually flag. This is a leading indicator, not a lagging one.
  
  

• Time-to-report: how fast a suspicious message reaches your security team once someone spots it. Faster reporting means faster containment.
  
  

• Failure rate: who clicks, replies, or hands over credentials, tracked by individual and by channel, not just as an org-wide average.
  
  

• Risk trend over time: a rolling view of exposure and behavior together, since a click-rate snapshot alone hides where risk is actually concentrated.

A small number of people typically account for a disproportionate share of an organization's risk. Tracking behavior at the individual level, continuously, is what lets a security team find and fix that concentration instead of running the same generic program at everyone indefinitely.

How Cimento Can Help

Most of the nine practices above require infrastructure most security teams don't have time to build from scratch: simulations across three channels, per-person risk scoring, in-the-moment coaching that actually fires at the moment of failure. That's the gap Cimento is built to close.

Cimento runs as a continuous risk engine rather than a once-a-year campaign:

• Integrate: connects to the identity, HR, and SIEM tools you already run to map who's actually exposed
  
  

• Simulate: AI-generated, role-adapted social engineering across email, SMS, voice, and impersonation, inside approved scope
  
  

• Score: each person gets a single score built from exposure, behavior, and resilience, refreshed continuously instead of recalculated at the next campaign
  
  

• Remediate: when someone fails a simulation, coaching lands in 60–90 seconds, at the moment it happens, and escalates until the behavior actually changes

Summing It Up

Preventing phishing scams isn't about running employees through more slides. It's about replacing an annual, email-only, completion-scored program with continuous practice across every channel attackers actually use, and treating the AI agents your employees now run as part of the same exposure you're already measuring in people.

That's the shift from security awareness training to human risk management (HRM): measuring exposure and behavior continuously, instead of checking a box once a year.

FAQs About Preventing Phishing Scams

1. What is the best way to prevent phishing scams?

The most effective approach combines continuous, adaptive simulation across every channel attackers use such as email, SMS, and voice, with in-the-moment coaching and behavior-based measurement, rather than a single annual training event.

2. What are phishing scams?

Phishing scams are attempts to trick someone into handing over credentials, money, or sensitive information by impersonating a trusted person or system, whether through email, text message, a phone call, or a video call.

3. How do phishing scams work?

Attackers typically research a target, build a believable pretext suited to that person's role, and create urgency to push them toward an action such as clicking a link, entering credentials, or approving a payment. before the target has time to verify.

4. How do you stop AI-generated phishing scams?

Stopping AI-generated and deepfake phishing requires training built on the specific patterns of these attacks, such as urgency paired with pressure to skip normal verification, and simulations that are updated as generation techniques evolve, since static training content goes stale quickly.

5. How often should phishing scam training happen?

Continuously, rather than annually. Knowledge decays quickly without repetition, so short, frequent simulations with rising difficulty build more durable behavior change than a single yearly course.

6. Does phishing training actually reduce risk?

Yes, when it's continuous, multi-channel, and measured by reporting rate and time-to-report rather than completion rate. Programs that stop at an annual email-only course tend to plateau, because the underlying skill isn't being practiced often enough to stick.