How Scammers Use Artificial Intelligence to Steal Your Money

Scammers have a new weapon to steal your money: artificial intelligence (AI). Two malicious uses of AI are voice cloning and deepfakes.

1. Voice cloning artificially replicates someone’s voice to sound very authentic, including the tone, intonation, and pronunciation.
2. Deepfakes are videos or photos that artificially replicate a person, often doing or saying something. There are many voice clones and deepfakes of CEOs, politicians, and celebrities.

Signs of voice cloning include:

• An emergency situation.
• A sense of fear or urgency for you to act immediately. The scammer does not want to give you time to think.
• A request for money in the form of a wire transfer, gift cards, payment application, or bank account information.
• A request for personal information.
• A request to keep the conversation secret.
• An offer that sounds too good to be true.

How Can You Protect Your Business and Your Family?

Take the following actions to help avoid being scammed:

• Let unknown calls go to voicemail.
• Be leery of caller ID; it can be faked.
• Do not give out personal information, such as bank information or passwords.
• Create a secret password to use with family and friends. Asking the person on the phone the secret password will help you know if it is real or a scam.
• Ask questions that only the real person would know the answers to and are not public information.
• Hang up, or use another phone to call the person directly using their real number.
• Keep social media private and encourage others to do the same. Scammers will learn about you and who your friends and family are to impersonate.
• Use two-factor authentication on services and accounts.
• Report scams to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) online.

Your security is our top priority. We will never contact you asking for your financial or personal information or ask a second person to log in to your computer to unlock your access. If you receive a message requesting sensitive information that claims to be from us, do not click any links, and contact us at 888-539-7928.

As a business, it is vital to inform your employees about this type of fraud. Share this information with your team and consider developing fraud prevention programs or procedures. Educating your employees and having clear steps to follow can help safeguard your business from these sophisticated scams.