See The Glory Of The AI Scam

One of the nice things about being retired is having the time to do things that I wouldn't have been able to do while I was working fulltime in Radio. While I spend most of time researching Cellular, Internet and Television costs, another area in which I’ve been fascinated is scamming. Recently, I wrote a post about a scam known as "Pig Butchering”. In it, I write about how the advent of Artificial Intelligence, (AI) has made it even more difficult to know the difference between a legitimate message from a Facebook friend and one from someone sitting in an Internet café in Lagos Nigeria. Here is a link to that post.

https://www.lowertechbills.com/post/don-t-get-ham-scammed

As I read about how AI is finding its way into the scammerverse, there are more and more stories about how people are losing thousands of dollars to criminals in schemes from fake love to phony investing. There’s an excellent website called socialcatfish.com which concentrates on so-called romance scams. It’s a real tragedy how people lose their lifesavings to these horrible people. And as much as we all can think, "It can’t happen to me”, it does. Artificial Intelligence is making it easier for scammers to steal and harder for innocent people to hold-on to money.

If you don’t think it can happen to you, here’s a cautionary tale that recently happened in San Rafael California. Mind you, that’s in Sanoma County, just up the road from Silicon Valley. Not only did the Grateful Dead spend a good deal of their long, strange trip in San Rafael, but it’s home to a lot of the Bay Area’s wealthier folks. It all started when Amy and Andy Trapp received a phone call in their home, featuring a perfect AI replica of their son Will’s distressed voice saying, "Mom, mom I’ve been in a car accident.” After moments of panic, a "police officer” came on the phone and told Amy and Andy that Will was OK but that he had injured a pregnant woman in the crash and was going to jail. Mind you, his own mother thought it was her son on the phone. In the meantime, Will was in his college living room, studying.

A few minutes later, the voice of a "public defender” came on the phone and told Amy and Andy that it would cost $15,000 in order to bail Will out. While they were gathering the funds, they decided to call the police to get more information. Sure enough, they found out that it was all a sophisticated ruse. The scammers had duped Will’s parents by using AI technology in order to replicate their son’s voice. It only took around three seconds of Will’s real voice, which the scammers easily captured on the Internet, for them to have had their say with Amy and Andy.

The happy ending is that the Trapp family did not fall for the trap set by the scammers. One phone call to the police and they didn’t take the bait. However, with easier access to, and improvements in, technology, it’s now really easy to even fool a mother and father. According to Christopher Alexander, Chief Analytics Officer at Pioneer Development, "Scams like these are growing every day as deepfake technology improves and becomes easier to access.” He also stated that they succeed because of the immense stress that is placed on the victims during this kind of trickery.

With the proliferation of AI and deepfake technology, it’s going to be harder and harder for even the most tech-savvy of us to recognize a scam from reality. It’s especially true when human emotions come into play and that’s exactly what these criminals are counting on. I closed the Pig Butchering post with a quote by Blues’ Seargent Phil Esterhaus of the 1980's hit series, "Hill Street Blues". He always closed rollcall with the words, "Let’s be careful out there”. Unfortunately, it may not be enough to be careful out there any longer. We also need to be careful in there (our homes) too.

For a free, no obligation Tech Check look at your Cell, Internet and TV bills, email hmwellsradio@gmail.com or visit lowertechbills.com because you may not have the time to do all the research, but I do.