Back during the dot com boom, I worked at a small, but public company. Wall Street analysts (or people that worked for them) would randomly call people up on their office phones (back during the days when people had their own office phone number) and try to befriend people. If they got a hook, over the course of a few phone calls, they would totally stroke their egos, and then ask them for information about the company.

For employees it was like they were doing favors for their friend, and the things they were asking were generally pretty small, but could increase over time.

We were warned about this happening since it happened before, so I'm sure similar techniques that worked 20 years ago still work today. It's just a form of social engineering.