The social system most people are brought up in makes them want to be told what to do. At home, kids are instructed by their parents; at work, there is a hierarchy of how command flows; and in politics, political leaders choose the path for the majority. In most setups, there will always be the one person in command that has the perceived privilege of telling people what to do. This can be used to the advantage of a social engineer as targets will already have been primed to be told what to do. In any interaction with a social engineer, a target has to be told what to do next. When the goal of the attack is finally reached, it is best to fill any holes that might be left. A social engineer is expected to give the target a logical conclusion of what has happened and that it will be coming to an end. Leaving them hanging after an attack or interaction raises questions, and these may lead them to pursue their own explanations.

At times, instead of giving a conclusion, a social engineer may give a target some follow-through actions. In our earlier attack of getting access to the server room; on our exit, we could tell the organization to regularly check the servers for any other problems and call for repair guys to come when there are errors. Of course, at this point, it is only logical to give the number of the actual repair company. The point is that the target will have gotten some closure and will give enough time for a social engineer to erase any ties to the attack. The advantage of a pretext for a social engineer is that it is noncommittal, one can always choose when to abandon it.

We have gone through the principles of pretexting; however, we still don't know anything about how social engineers build a pretext and actualize it. There are many aspects of pretexting that a social engineer needs to get right in order to pretext successfully. The following section discusses them.