AI - Future Fraudster?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to make life easier – indeed many of us already use AI in our daily lives. It pops up all the time - whether it's a smart speaker telling you the weather forecast, Maps letting you know that there's heavy traffic building up on your
planned route, or Spotify compiling the ultimate playlist to transport you to your teenage years, AI is already embedded in our home and work environments.

Unfortunately, the development of more sophisticated AI tools, such as Chat GPT, brings with it many new fraud risks. Chat GPT generates text at the request of the user – and what makes it unique is that it produces text with a “human tone”. This makes it much harder to tell that the content has been produced by a machine.

At work you will almost certainly have received phishing emails that have been produced by a fraudster. Traditionally, these scam emails have had telltale warning signs, such as strange wording, or spelling and grammar errors that help us to spot them.

AI can create really convincing phishing emails as it is unlikely to contain spelling or grammar errors, and it has been designed to sound "human". There is also new AI powered voice generating software, which can allow a fraudster to "hijack" your voice using a 3 second clip of you speaking.

Alongside these developments, there has been a rapid growth in AI art generators. These have become very popular as the user can generate impressive, bespoke profile pictures / content for use on social media. Unfortunately, some of these apps have hidden viruses lurking behind the scenes which can compromise your device and data. You may also come across AI-enabled scams on social media sites, such as this one which was spotted on Linked In recently.

Keeping yourself safe

• Always be suspicious if you are asked to click on a link in an email or on a social media post.
• If you are on a desktop or laptop, you can use your mouse to hover over the link to see where it will take you.
• It is not easy to hover over links on touch screen devices. If in doubt, log into a desktop/laptop and hover over the link.
• Be wary about which apps you download – you can find some useful advice on safe app interaction on the Verified website.

Other useful articles can be found in our Counter Fraud Newsletters on the Publications page