Well, the trick that I saw played wasn't on either military forces or civilians, but on Soviet bureaucrats.
It was the early 1980's. Reagan was President and the Soviets were still our enemies. I was a mere kid running a bulletin board. That was before the internet was popular or even viable outside of research facilities and universities (and military bases). People dialed in to bulletin boards back then on an individual basis.
But I owned this particular hacker board, and ownership has its privileges. One of the private email exchanges on it between some hard core phone phreaks (you'd probably call them "hackers" today) was about an insurance scam that was legal to play.
The hackers had discovered that the Soviet embassies wouldn't accept large unsolicited packages from the West (might have bugs or bombs or drugs in them, I guess), but they didn't follow Western rules and wouldn't return said packages, either. Who knows, perhaps they blew them up or sent such packages off to some agency for study, catagorization, processing, or storage.
But the hackers claimed that the Soviets were getting stuck paying off the insurance on said packages for diplomatic reasons. The email even had the address of two Soviet embassies, including one in Poland, and mentioned that you could insure international packages for $5,000 back then.
Then one of the later exchanges had the hackers discussing a killer sound system that they had just purchased with their windfall.
Apparently the Soviets got stuck paying off several of those claims, too. The email chain that I watched would have been tough to fake. They were talking about this scam, their windfall money, and various items that they kept purchasing... over a period of two years.