In my 2024 book The World’s Wildest Cons, I wrote about the rise of AI scams. In one case, AI had been used to simulate the voice of a woman’s adult daughter, allowing scammers to create a fake kidnapper, phoning the mother and playing what sounded like the voice of her child. In another case, the technology was used to authorize a large bank payment.
It didn’t take much imagination to predict that this kind of scam would become a growth field. The “imposter scam” used to be an elaborate business, the sort of thing they’d do on Mission Impossible, but with video conferencing and AI, it’s all much easier.
But as it turned out, a much bigger threat is the way AI has infiltrated the more routine cons, like fake job offers. These scams have been around for years. The basic technique is to convince someone that they have been selected for a good job, then while they are riding high, find a way to make them send money for something.
Making that first connection is the tough part. Consider how you would react if someone messaged you saying: “You’ve been selected for a high-paying job where you can work from home!” You’d have to be very naive or very desperate to fall for that one. It simply reeks of scam.
That’s where AI comes in. No high-tech imposters required – it's all done with text. Scammers can lift a mass of credentials from a site like LinkedIn – names and work experience. They feed it into an AI, which rapidly churns out a mass of imaginary jobs listings, one per person. Each is perfectly tailored to the target’s qualifications, and the me. The letter with the job offer looks much more convincing than the typical old-fashioned scam.
Guardian journalist Victoria Turk is in the tech business and has written about AI fakery, but in this article, she wrote about how she was still taken in by the first stage of the scam. She received a job offer that looked real, and she only had doubts when they asked her to pay a specialist to help her improve her CV – a clumsy way of getting money compared to many employment scams.
Advances in technology have been a huge boon to criminals. A few decades ago, it was rare to encounter a scam. You might get a nuisance sales call, but it was generally selling something real. Today, most phone calls are fraudulent, coming from fake local numbers. Email is even worse – the vast majority of email “spam” is not unwanted sales messages, but outright fraud. We are exposed to more individualized fraud than at any time in history, and AI makes the scams harder to spot.
What we really need is people who can spot this kind of fraud. And that's the job I'd like to offer you now. It pays $100 an hour and you can work from home...