AI-Powered Scams Are Becoming More Common

Imposter Phone Calls

Artificial intelligence is getting more sophisticated by the day. This tech can be used for all sorts of wonderful things, but, unfortunately, many scammers are misusing tools like ChatGPT to try to scam people out of their money.

In 2022, the most common occurrence of fraud was the “imposter phone scam” which uses synthetic voice generation to mimic a person’s voice. These realistic-sounding phone calls resulted in $11 million stolen last year.

To run the scam, fraudsters use AI voice-generating software to mimic the voice of someone that you know and love. Then, they call and use the fake voice to try and convince you to send money to cover some sort of emergency.

Using ChatGPT

One of the reasons that this scam is so convincing is that fraudsters have started using AI chatbots to create real-time responses.

In the past, these phone scams were typically pre-recorded messages. And, most of the time, the bot’s pre-recorded responses didn’t make sense in the conversation, potentially tipping you off that you were talking to a robot.

These days, scammers are using AI chatbots like ChatGPT to generate surprisingly realistic scripts with adaptive real-time responses. This makes it much more difficult to determine if you’re speaking to a robot — or if your loved one actually needs help.

Avoiding This Scam

The easiest way to avoid this scam is to simply be mindful that it exists. This means having your guard up whenever you get an unexpected phone call, even if it’s from someone that you know well.

Since caller ID can be faked, it’s not necessarily a reliable sign that you’re talking to the right person. When in doubt, tell the person you will call them back, hang up, and then call the number that you have for that contact.

AI is making it harder and harder to determine what’s a scam and what’s real. By being mindful of how AI is being abused, you can protect yourself from falling victim to this trap.

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