The success of a pretext can be directly attributed to the amount of time spent doing researching on it. The more a social engineer is informed about a pretext, the higher the chances are that it will work. The reverse is also true because the less a social engineer knows about a pretext, the higher the chances of mistakes and ultimately a failure of the pretext. A big chunk of the research will fall into identifying the interests and connections of a target. This will enable the social engineer to mold the perfect scenario for the pretext and also to decide on the personality pretext to assume. Humans have several weaknesses, and they are closely tied to their personalities. It is these weaknesses that social engineers will search for and exploit.

At times, just a small chunk of information about a target can make a ton of difference. Past events in a target's life, items of possession, favorite brands, shopping and shipping preferences, and a target's affiliations can all be effective at finding a weak spot from where a pretext attack can be crafted. For example, a target that contributes toward a charity could be attacked by social engineers that create a pretext on the same grounds. The pretext will have to be a big charitable organization with web and social media presence to help the target verify its existence. From this, the social engineer will have to reach out to the target seeking for financial assistance. By doing so, the target will be convinced of the existence of the charity foundation and will make a sizeable charitable donation, just that the money will end up in private pockets.

Emotions are highly exploited in pretexts. It is easy to get to a target if the social engineer can play with their emotions. In a rather sad manipulation of emotions, social engineers took advantage of the 2010 Haiti earthquakes that had received worldwide attention and artists from all over were trying to spread awareness and raise funds for the victims. There were many other charities also doing the same, trying to source funds from donors so as to contribute to the victims of the earthquake. However, social engineers took advantage of the situation and created a pretext that worked effectively. There were those who created fake charity websites and advertised them. They ended up getting rich from the proceeds of this evil deed because there were very many willing donors. However, there was another group of social engineers that set up a site that they claimed had the names of the people that had been lost in the tragedy. However, their site was malicious and only collected personal details of the people who signed up on it and also spread some malware to the devices that visited the site. These malware were later used to hack and steal more information from the people who had visited such sites. It is highly likely that the same type of pretext can be repeated today if a similar large-scale tragedy befalls people. There is an increased knowledge about Google's site indexing algorithm, something that makes people able to optimize their sites to be ranked higher up in certain keyword searches.

Social engineers already have access to techniques for optimizing their sites for search engines such as Google. Therefore, they can quickly come up with a site and push it up the ranks for search results related to keywords such as disasters, charities, or donations. Innocent people could easily end up contributing money to nonexistent charities in the event of another Haiti-like disaster.

From the discussion on this principle, you have noted the power of good research. With enough information, one can easily set up a pretext that is effective. In the Haiti example, in as much as it is sad, it can be seen that a perfect pretext always works, especially when it is laced with some emotions. The social engineers behind the Haiti charity websites went to  great depths to create nonexistent entities on the internet and set up their web and social media presence in order to appeal to donors. They knew what donors were looking for, and they gave them exactly that. With the right information, it is easy to get a successful pretext.