A French woman who thought she was in a relationship with the actor Brad Pitt for a year and a half was scammed out of $850,00 by crooks using AI. The French broadcaster TF1 withdrew a programme about her because she was subject to considerable mockery. Well, none of us would ever fall for something like that, right? Wrong.
Scammers Everywhere
There are a thousand stories about this every single day. Just to pick one at random: an English man just lost £3,250 after seeing a Facebook video purporting to be Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, advising people to invest in a new AI trading platform. Please do not look at that story and think to yourself “I would never fall for for that”.
Investment scams like that one (known as “pig butchering”) account for just over one quarter of all authorised push payment (APP) fraud cases, where victims are duped into directly transferring money to a scammer and, in the UK at least, the victims are often young professional men who have one thing in common — they thought they were too smart to fall for a deception.
Barclays Bank says that one in five UK customers lost money to scammers last year. Across all of the types of scams reported by their customers, three-quarters originated on social media and tech platforms, particularly where the combination of paid verification and AI gives the scammers tools fool most of the people, most of the time. Social media is a particular problem. The Federal Trade Commission called it “a golden goose for scammers” noting that the most popular way scammers reached out to their victims was through Instagram (29%) and Facebook (28%).
These scams are not all about money, of course. You may have read the somewhat surprising story of the British Member of Parliament who was lured into some inappropriate behaviour (including the disclosure of personal details of fellow politicians) via a dating app. He was ensnared via unsolicited WhatsApp messages that were sent to a number of politicians that soon escalted into the exchange of initimate images. William Wragg, the unfortunate MP (then vice chairman of the influential 1922 committee of Conservative Party backbenchers) said that ‘I got chatting to a guy on an app and we exchanged pictures. We were meant to meet up for drinks, but then didn’t”.
I was talking at a bank recently and the subject of these scams came around. Would AI mean an uncontrollable escalation in fraud or would AI mean a solid defence against it to everyone’s benefit? We explored some scenarios looking at how different trends might evolve. I remember at one point the fraud manager for the bank expressing some scepticism about the impact of technology and saying words to the effect of “good luck with your digital signatures, because I have seven customers right now who think they are in a secret relationship with Harry Styles”.
Well, indeed. These romance scams are a particular problem and they do not all involve pop stars. Again, some random examples from the press. A man from Northern Ireland lost £200,000 to a non-existent American girlfriend. A Scottish woman had a heart attack after losing £17,000 to a scammer she met on a dating app. Just to give you an idea of scale, a single fraudster who was found guilty of romance scamming Americans out of more than $2 billion used Bitcoin to move funds co-conspirators in Nigeria.
Dr. Elisabeth Carter, Associate Professor in School of Law, Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Kingston in London, is a criminologist and forensic linguist who published a rather interesting book about this. In The Language of Romance Crimes (Cambridge University Press, 2024), she explores the totally fascinating interplay of love, money and crime which tells us a lot of about identity, relationships and reputation in the online world. One of her key conclusions is that we cannot look at the victims in narrow terms that disguise the reality of fraud as a type of abuse and “misrepresents victims as having done something for the crime to be visited upon them”.
I agree. We should take action to help them. But what?
Taking Scammers
My friend from the bank was making an extremely good point which was that, as we all understand, it is the human being that is the weakest link in the cyber security chain.
Now, we could try to deal with this problem with an education campaign but in all honesty I feel I must express my considered scepticism about any strategy that involves consumer education and press for alternatives. And here I think we do see some light at the end of the tunnel.
A dedicated fraudster might well be able to convince me over the phone that he is the Manchester City first team coach Pep Guardiola who has been observing my considered social media postings on the balance of the 4231 formation versus the 433 with a holding midfielder. It might happen. Skilled pig butchers operating from their Asian base might well be able to convince me that there is a warrant out for my arrest and I need to pay an outstanding traffic fine from Kazakhstan or face arrest via Interpol. That could happen. AI enhanced criminals might well be able to persuade me that I have had last been recognised for a knighthood for Services to Fintech and that I need to send the King a down payment for my new robes. I might fall for that one.
People are fooled by the most outlandish things every single day and the scammers are getting away with it with impunity.
Forget about trying to educate me. These are all good reasons for handing over control of my finances to a robot. A robot wouldn’t look for a picture of Brad Pitt, or a Catalan accent, or a traffic light in Almaty or any other such distractions. The robot would look for a digital signature. A robot would demand verifiable credentials. A robot would resolve chains of trust in an instant to determine whether it is indeed talking to noted financial advisor Martin Lewis from the television or to an impostor trying to pump and dump some flavour of the week memecoin via a bogus Bloomberg screenshot on X.
You can try to scam me, yes. And you can make a pretty convincing fake Brad Pitt video to do it. But you cannot make a pretty convincing Brad Pitt digital signature. Please let’s get on and actually do something about fraud.
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