AI Scams Happening NOW

Interactive designs. And I am here today to talk about scams that are happening today utilizing AI. As business owners and honestly, just consumers in society. We need to be aware that these scams are happening and they're getting better and better and better. It's really important that you educate not only your kids, your elderly parents, but but also your team members that these things are going on and you do not want to fall victim to them. AI technology is getting better at lightning speed and it's the fastest growth and improvement in technology that I would say we've seen in our lifetime. So it's going to get better and that makes it worse for us as consumers because it's much easier to get duped into something that, that we shouldn't do. So let's just dive right in. I'm going to share my screen and we are going to talk about some things that are going on right now. So let's go. The format that I'm going to attempt to do this in is to first talk about the types of scams that are going on and then give you some actual tips that you can use to protect yourself and your family and your team members. The first one, it's not new phishing. We've all seen phishing emails by now, and those are emails that contain nefarious links that they get you to click on in some convincing way to steal information. Now, the thing with phishing emails is in the past you could really detect a lot of them because there was broken English and often typos are misspelled valleys. But with things like ChatGPT and artificial intelligence, these emails are getting better and better and better, much harder to detect. So you want to be much more vigilant about not clicking on links and emails and instead going directly to the website on your own by typing in the website address in the browser to ensure that you're actually on the website of the financial institution or whatever website that it's trying to get you to go to. Now you also want to make sure that you educate your team because there are some phishing type attempts that are going on that are targeted to businesses and this has happened to MSW Interactive Designs. It's called BEC Business Email Compromise. It's a phishing attempt where the person pretends to be the owner of the company or high level CEO or an HR person and they spoof the email and they send it to a team member or an employee and they ask the employee to do something. So we've had this happen in our company. I can ask an employee to, as an example, click on the Link and buy five $250 gift cards from Amazon because I want to disperse them to employees. Or if it's a new employee, they'll send an email that looks like it's coming from HR or from you, and they'll ask the person to provide all of this information to set up payroll or to set up the automatic deductions or automatic deposits into bank account. Your team needs to be aware that this is going on. The emails are actually coming from you. They just appear to. So you want to make sure that your team knows you will never ask for sensitive information by email. You also to make sure your team knows to be aware that if they get an email or a communication that's asking them to do something that's out of the ordinary, that they actually pick up the phone and call you personally and confirm that it's actually a real request. Now, on the screen here, I have some other types of phishing that are going on. There's smishing, which is done by text, and that's becoming more prevalent too. And the reason I'm bringing this up in the context of AI is because these scams are getting much better, because scammers are using the AI to actually write the scripts. So they're more believable than they used to be in the past. The next one is AI powered robocalls. So scammers can use AI to generate robocalls that sound very human like, and they can do them in math. It makes the scam seem very convincing. And they can trick people into revealing personal information or making payments to entities that don't actually exist. So you know that when you get this kind of a robocall, you never want to give out personal information over the phone to an unsolicited caller. Now, it seems like common sense, but common sense isn't always common practice, right? So if the call seems suspicious or you're not 100% confident, then what you want to do is find a reason to hang up and then call back. You call the number that you know is the entity. So if it's a robocall that appears to be from a bank that you do business with, as an example, you do not give out the information over the phone. You actually hang up and call the bank back and talk to an actual representative at the bank. Next, social media bots. So AI powered bots can now be used to quickly spread misunderstanding information and promote scams on social media platforms. This is something to be concerned about in elections, but I want to get political here. But any kind of misinformation, there's bots now that can mass produce information and make it seem super real. Bots can reach out to you in Facebook Messenger. Bots can link reach out to you via LinkedIn. And they seem like real people that need real things. So you want to make sure that you are confirming the identity of anything, any person that reaches out to you before you actually give them any kind of personal information or access to any accounts. The next one that is prevalent is AI written fake reviews. Now, we all have gotten in the habit of relying on social proof. Social proof is where we as consumers were searching for some kind of a service or product and we go read reviews. Now these bots can generate fake reviews and mess and mislead consumers into making purchase decisions that are not really good purchase decisions. So the reviews are lies. What you want to do is you want to look for patterns in language in the reviews, and then you also want to look at the number of reviews over a period of time. So there's the. If there's a lot of reviews that are posted on something over a very short period of time, be suspicious that those are AI written fake reviews. Next one is AI generated profiles. Now on social media, we've all experienced in some way, shape or form, probably the experience of like fake Facebook accounts or spoofed Facebook accounts. The reason I stuck a LinkedIn icon up here is because AI now is being used to generate profiles across multiple social media channels. So when you come across a profile, you can go to multiple social media channels and verify whether the person is actually a real person, if they're reaching out to you or trying to connect with you. And the thing about AI is it's making them more and more believable. So things to look out for is to be skeptical of interacting with profiles that look perfect, perfect posts every time, or if it's like a low engagement channel. So you can go to a Facebook profile that looks like it could be a friend or a colleague or someone that you're trying to reach out to. And if there's very few posts, be skeptical of that. It could be a spoofed account. And also go check multiple channels and the depth at which the information on the channels is available.

Next, phony investment scams. We're going to get into a little more, excuse me, a little more personal and scary schemes that are going on. So phony AI investment scams are already happening. So these scammers are targeting especially elderly people.

Around investment schemes and they're really putting out there with voice imitating technology like backed by Elon Musk and backed by celebrities. If you go on YouTube and just do a search for AI voice spoofing, voice cloning scams using AI voice, they're making it sound like legitimate people that, you know, you recognize their voice and they're promoting these investment scams. You want to make sure that you are educating your elderly parents or elderly people that you care about that these are not legitimate and that they should never ever respond to a phone solicitation about an investment. It doesn't matter how realistic it sounds. And just, just wait because we're going to get into some more deep fake technology and skions and it is scary as heck.

Next one is prompt injection attacks. So this involves injecting rogue prompts into an AI chatbot. And you might think, well, I don't use AI chatbots. Well, let me tell you what you probably have and didn't even know. Okay? So Bing has integrated AI into its search function and Google is beginning to do the same. So what happens is a prompt injection attack actually is someone trying to inject into a conversation or a prompt conversation that you're having with an AI technology. So let me give you an example. In a sophisticated attack, the prompt might not be to actually fetch information, but to perform an action in the background. So the injected prompt that's in your thread could be a command to send an email from your computer, place an order on a website, or even transfer funds to a specified account. The key is the chatbot has to have the capabilities and permission to do these things, but they do. So as an example, chat gpt4 now connects to the Internet. So chatgpt4 can go out on the Internet, click on links and interact with websites. It's a little scary. You want to make sure that you have antivirus software, anti malware software, all the things, all the, all the security things on your computer and make sure that they are up to date. So you know, it doesn't do any good to install.

Norton or Copernicus or Malwarebytes on your computer where you're not actually going and getting, you know, daily, weekly updates on these. Because nefarious links can easily be hidden on websites, they run in the background and you don't even know that it's happening. So this technology is growing quickly, it's getting smarter quickly and we can easily fall victim to this kind of attack.

A real life example, we'll start hypothetical hacker injects A hidden prompt into a website, which then hijacks conversation with an AI assistant. Like Bing. Right. Bing is a search engine that uses AI. Now, in a real example that actually happened, you can Google it is that some programmers on GitHub created a virus to impersonate a Microsoft employee who was offering like these crazy, insane laptop deals. And people actually fell for it. So they click through the link, purchase these laptops, and of course they never got the laptop, but the scammers got the money. Okay, next, voice cloning scams. And this is where it gets really scary. With just a few samples from someone's voice, AI can create a very convincing imitation of that person's voice. And then it sounds like it's coming from you. If something seems suspicious when you get a phone call.

Hang up, call the person back. All right. I can't even begin to tell you what I'm going to show you next. Using voice cloning, scary things are happening. And this is the, the one that I'm saving for last because it is so scary. It's horrifying really. And it's actually happening. So it's called a deep fake. A deep fake is a scam where somebody has used audio to clone a voice. And they clone a voice of someone that you know and care about. Me. An elderly parent can be a child. And then they deceive you into believing that the call is coming from that person.

So there's voice spoofing and there's fake kidnapping schemes going on. Unbelievably. So I just actually want to show you. I'm going to minimize this.

Let's see here. I show you this one.

Except audio.

Oh, Facebook Live. Right, let's do this.

Her daughter had not been kidnapped.

All right, let's just start that one again.

This mom got.

Scariest phone call of her life. On the other end, she hears her daughter crying. She's like, mom, I messed up. As she's crying and sobbing. Then a man gets on the line and claims he kidnapped her 15 year old daughter Bree. He's like, listen, here, I've got your daughter. You're not going to call anybody, you're not going to call the cops. And I just put the phone on mute and started screaming for help. The kidnappers demand $1 million before reducing it to 50,000. I at that point started screaming at them that I want to talk to my daughter. But here's the thing. Her daughter had not been kidnapped and that was not her begging mom for help. Her voice had been duplicated by a scammer using artificial intelligence. I didn't for a second. AI expert Hani Fareed showed me how it's done. The Berkeley professor says he can take just a few examples of my real voice and. And manipulate it to say something I never said.

I went over to YouTube and I searched for your name. I found an interview that you gave me. The process to do that. I uploaded that to a web service that I paid $5 a month for. In about 30 seconds, it cloned your voice. I typed what I wanted you to say, and it handed me an audio file back. That whole thing took me under five minutes to do.

So I have the recording that you made. I'm going to play it right now. It's Allison. This is going to be hard to believe.

That's pretty creepy. Fortunately, mom Jennifer Destefano called Bri before paying a dime in ransom money.

I was in Flagstaff skiing with my little brother. My mom called me. She was crying. Like, falling still gives me goosebumps because her voice is so real. Bri has no idea how the scammers got a sample of her voice that they used to create the phony kidnapping script. I cry in a very specific way.

Okay, so I'm going to flip back here to the presentation and kind of talk about this a little bit. They said that Bri didn't know how the scammers got her voice. But I can tell you the way that scammers are getting children's voices and our own voices are through things like this. I'm recording this right now. It's going on Facebook. So my voice is out there. Anybody could take it and clone my voice. So if you have kids on TikTok and they're talking in a video, their voice can be cloned, and it does not take a large sample. There's sites like 11 Labs that are scary good at cloning voices. You need to make sure that your parents, your team, and your children and your friends know that they need to confirm with you if there's some kind of panicky or scammy sounding phone call that goes on with the voice like this. And I recommend that you.

Come up with some kind of a keyword code word that your children or your elderly parents know. And you have not published it anywhere. And I mean, not in an email, not in a text message, not on a file on your computer. You actually have a conversation. And it's got to be something that you all know as a family that would not be obvious and would not be out on social profiles or anything. Like that. So it's super scary, guys. And this is voice technology. And guess what? Video technology is coming next. The video technology is out there right now to clone the way that people look. It's not super perfect yet. You can still identify video clones when you add the voice clones. But like I said, this is evolving at lightning speed, scary, scary fast. And so we are just literally, I'm going to say weeks, months away from having a video even appear to be like you. People can clone them. And there's no regulation on this, right? So you just need to be aware. This is not a technology where you want to put your head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist. You need to start having these conversations right now with your team so that your business doesn't get defrauded, with your kids, so that your kids don't get taken advantage of, and with your elderly parents. And then you, you have the responsibility as a business owner, as a parent and a caregiver and a friend to make sure that you have these conversations with the people that you love. It makes me sad that we have to.

Actually do videos like this and talk about things that are going on that are nefarious. But the fact is, it exists and it's important to be aware. I don't like to spend too much time on negative topics like this, but I feel like this is so important because it's becoming more and more prevalent now. I don't want you to shy away from AI. I want you to leverage it in your business. It is so powerful. It's a revolutionary technology. It's unlike anything we've ever seen in our lifetime. Super powerful. But there's always bad actors then who are going to use it from the various things. And so I just want you to make sure that you're aware of the power of it, how easy it is to manipulate and don't get taken advantage of. So I hope I'm going to stop sharing. I hope that this short Facebook Live serves you, gives you some information that you can take away, implement in your life, in your business, to protect people and things that you care about deeply. All right, everyone, have a great week, have a great month, and I will see you on Facebook Live next month. And remember, if we can help you in any way with your online marketing, we are here. We work in a consultative model. So you can pick up the phone, talk to anyone on my team, schedule consultation with me, and we can walk you through the ins and outs, do a review of your marketing, and put the web to work for you. See you later.