AI Is Empowering Scammers, and Even the Sophisticated Are Being Fooled
We've all seen the messages. "Your great uncle from Sudan is leaving you $9,000,000. All we need is for you to click this link...."
I generally fill these blog posts with important real estate information. Today, I felt that it was important to alert you to a growing problem that can impact anyone. Scammers.
It used to be that the only scammers you had to worry about were telephone scammers. Then the internet came around, and suddenly scammers were taking advantage of the world wide web technology. With so much banking and investing being done online in various forms, the opportunities for being scammed increased dramatically. In most cases, however, it was still relatively easy to distinguish the scammers from the legitimate email and text senders. With AI, that is rapidly changing.
Scammers of Old
Until very recently, it was relatively easy to recognize a scam message (either text or email) because the scammers most often used poor English, and they would say things that were simply outlandish. One of the most popular scams was the one I quoted above (or one very similar to it). These messages usually involved a supposed long lost relative who died in some far away place and named you as the only beneficiary of their enormous fortune. The message would encourage you to either click a link and provide bank account information or call a number whereby a person would ask you for bank account or credit card information. Of course, those few who did so would be wiped out of their savings.
Times are changing though, and scammers are getting more sophisticated thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies.
AI is Helping Scammers
For all the good that AI is doing in our world, there is a dark side to it. Scammers are utilizing tools such as ChatGPT to help them craft more realistic sounding messages. As a result, many people's first line of defense against scamming - poor grammar and nonsensical messages - is starting to break down.
The Wall Street Journal ran an article this week detailing examples of folks - even sophisticated folks - who have been fooled recently by scammers. In one case, a man was called by someone claiming to be a police officer. The "officer" knew his social security number as well as lots of personal information about him. The "officer" informed him that he had missed jury duty and that he needed to come to the station to set things right. While the man was driving to the station, the scammer told him he needed to wire money to settle the fine he owed. Fortunately, at this point the man figured out it was a scam, and he turned around and went home.
If you have ever been to jury duty, you might not have been fooled in the first place, but it's easy to see how someone could be fooled into thinking this was a legitimate phone call if they were not familiar with the jury duty process.
Then, there was the recent case where an 84-year-old woman from Texas was nearly conned out of $40,000. A scammer had convinced her she needed to withdraw money from her bank account and deposit it in a bitcoin ATM. After a good Samaritan saw what was happening, they alerted police. When an officer arrived, he was able to stop the woman from depositing her money in the machine.
With all the new complex scamming schemes out there, what can you do to protect yourself?
What You Can Do to Guard Against Scammers
First, I never ever click on a link in an unsolicited email, even if I think it is a legitimate email. If a financial institution is trying to reach me, I will be able to call them or message them directly to find out what is going on. I always open a new web browser and go directly to their website to lookup contact information for them. Then I call them or email them using the information I found on their site. This ensures I am not following a sinister hyperlink that someone might have sent me.
While it is possible to hover over a link in a message and decipher the true URL, I prefer to play it safe and simply type in the website URL in a fresh browser myself. This way I don't accidentally click it. Sometimes scammers can make URLs (i.e. www.something.com/someotherwords.php) look pretty legit, so even eyeballing them can lead to trouble. Save yourself the potential heartache and manually type in a website's URL any time you visit a bank or financial institution's website.
When it comes to phone calls, if I get a call out of the blue asking me for financial information, I will politely tell the person on the other line that I will look up their number and call them myself. I've never had a legit company get upset with me for doing so. Scammers, on the other hand, will often get angry and belligerent when you tell them you want to call them directly.
Conclusion
While scammers are getting better at fooling people, you can still protect yourself by being smart and patient. Financial institutions know that scamming is a real problem, and it is always in their best interest as well as yours to ensure any financial transaction is legitimate. If you are ever in doubt, hang up the phone and look up the institution's number for yourself and call them directly. If you are trying to transact something online, open a new web browser and manually type the institution's address in the address bar. Doing these things should prevent you from unknowingly giving money to the bad guys.