Friends, make them give away their important information, persuade them to let you use their computer(don't do anything bad, just change the wallpaper). Tell them what you could have done with it. Thats all i can think of right now.

I mainly work on my social engineering skills online personally. Doing anything from impersonating users on various social networking sites (mainly MySpace) to PMing people in Chat Rooms and going from there.

It's a neat thing to be good at. You could always try selling lemonade outside of your house; trying to raise money for <what ever here>, or go door to door selling candy bars - claiming your <so and so> from <where ever> trying to raise money for <your lie here>.

@pizza - friends is another way to practice on - but some people may get offended your deceiving them & they fell for it. Don't want to lose friends now.

You may want to look into Mitnick's Book: The Art of Deception - you may like it!

i think this is key in practice!

if you come to think about it, even just by asking someone a question (even just talking to someone) gives you communication skills you can use later on. remeber that i am talking about a REAL topic you can discuss with someone, not just "chattering". so the more social you become, the more you can do to practice these skills.

I'll second Jhaddix recommendations - practicing at places such as meetups and discussion groups is great as you can get in contact with many people etc. and a discussion with strangers is natural at those places.


I think this is a complete different area here. Usually a friend will act differently to you than to a stranger, obviously, and I think it is common that a good friend would give you 'more options' than an unknown person. I wouldn't recommend to practice persuasion with a friend without his/ her knowledge or agreement.