Always stay alert, scammers use AI to trick victims.
Deepfakes are increasingly being used in romance scams to trick victims into believing they are talking to a real person in order to steal large sums of money, a charity has warned.
Lisa Mills, relationship fraud expert at the charity Victim Support, said fraudsters have taken advantage of the latest deepfake technology to create video clips of themselves “manipulating victims into believing that they’re real people”.
One victim had £350,000 stolen by a fraudster who she believed she was in a legitimate two-year relationship with after they used deepfake technology during video calls.
The scammer, who met the victim on a dating website, had even proposed using a photo which had been digitally altered showing a man holding a sign that read: “Will you marry me?”.
The victim, in their fifties, withdrew their pension pot early and even resorted to selling personal possessions after the fraudster convinced them they were being held hostage and tortured by loan sharks.
“Aside from the financial aspect, the victims go through a lot of emotional stress because they feel like their boyfriend or girlfriend is in danger,” said Ms Mills.
She warned people that technology is getting “more sophisticated”, with deepfakes set to become a “dangerous tactic in the fraudsters’ toolkit”.
Deepfakes – also known as “synthetic media” – are videos, images or audio files that use a form of artificial intelligence (AI) to digitally manipulate existing content, for example by replacing images of faces with someone else’s likeness, to create fake events.
As AI algorithms become increasingly sophisticated, it has become more difficult to distinguish fake content from reality.
A fake image of Pope Francis wearing a white puffer jacket and a bejewelled crucifix – generated by AI program Midjourney – went viral over the weekend racking up millions of views, with many people thinking it was a real photograph.
Days before, Eliot Higgins, founder of investigative journalism group Bellingcat, used Midjourney to generate images of former US president Donald Trump being arrested. While he made clear the images were falsified, the images spread without attribution meaning many people mistakenly thought they were real.
Artificial Intelligence is a valuable tool and a formidable adversary. Scammers use AI to trick victims, so please stay alert. It’s also just the latest tech update in a long line of sophisticated tools scammers are using to trick victims. Toby Walsh, Chief Scientist at the UNSW AI Institute, explains. #TheProjectTV #AITech #Scammers