Put your hands together and welcome AI the latest fraudster

BY MICHAEL THOMAS

Imagine getting a call from something sounding exactly like your child requesting financial help, only to find out after you have transferred the requested funds that it was someone using Audio Artificial Intelligence aka AI to fleece you out of your hard-earned money.

Ladies and gents welcome the new thief on the block.

Technology has reached a stage now where computer-generated children’s voices are so realistic; that they fool the children ‘s parents. There are masks created with photos from social media that can fool a system protected by facial ID. What is next?

To some, this may sound far-fetched, but as I write this article this is already happening, and the financial loss some folks are incurring is higher than Mount Everest.

In the US alone, consumers lost over $8 billion last year, up 44% from 2021. “It’s an arms race,” says James Roberts, who heads up fraud management at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the country’s biggest bank. “It would be a stretch to say that we’re winning.”

The art of scamming is as old as time itself, but with time comes experience and improvement, and I do believe that is exactly what we are seeing in these times.

This too is one of the unique opportunities that the Plandemic has helped enormously. The accelerated adoption of online banking around the world, with phones and laptops replacing face-to-face interactions at bank branches. All this brought advantages in lower costs and increased speed for financial firms and their customers, as well as openings for scammers. A Scam which created opportunities for more scams.

“We are starting to see much more sophistication with respect to cybercrime,” says Amy Hogan-Burney, general manager of cybersecurity policy and protection at Microsoft Corp.

Universally, cybercrime costs including scams, are set to hit $8 trillion this year, outstripping the economic output of Japan, the world’s third-largest economy. By 2025 it will reach $10.5 trillion.

Social engineering scams, as some like to call such tricks as child-voice cloning, tend to have the highest hit rates and generate some of the quickest returns for fraudsters.

“It’s a fair bet that over the next two or three years we’re going to see more AI-generated criminal attacks,” says Pope, a former deputy commissioner in the New Zealand Police who oversaw some of the nation’s highest-profile criminal cases. “What AI does is accelerate the levels of sophistication and the ability of these bad people to pivot very quickly. AI makes it easier for them.”

So next time a voice that sounds exactly like your child calls asking for money, call a cab and go find your child in person to verify where and to whom your money is going.

That said, we must all be mindful that some of the real criminals are in positions of authority. These criminals are using fraud as a scary tactic to frighten us into giving up our rights and freedoms so that they can enslave us.