Maybe you’ve heard of this longtime scam: Someone calls or texts to let you know you’ve won money in a lottery, but to get the cash, you have to pay a finder’s fee, or a tax, or a processing fee. But of course, after you pay, no lottery earnings materialize.
Or what about this one: A grandmother is contacted, supposedly by her grandchild, to ask for money in an emergency.
Both of these cons are getting new life through artificial intelligence.
Dave Lieber, the watchdog investigative columnist at the Dallas Morning News, said AI helps scammers recreate the voices of loved ones.
“They create the voice of, let’s say, it’s a grandson supposedly who calls grandmother and needs money and the grandson is really a fraudster,” Lieber said. “But they’ve figured out how to capture the voice of the grandchild, and they use AI to make it sound just like him or her. So when he or she calls grandma and says, ‘I’m in jail, I need $5,000 to get out, don’t tell your mom and dad. You know, the voice sounds remarkably like the actual grandson or granddaughter.”
The lottery scam has been around for a while, but is getting new life through AI, Lieber said.
“That was basically that you are told that you won $50,000 in the European lottery,” he said. “The only problem is you never entered the European lottery.”
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AI can be used to make this scam seem more believable as well. Texans have lost $37 million to this scam, Lieber said.
“The average loss to victims is $1,4000, which is a lot of money for a lot of people,” he said. “It’s happening everywhere and not only is it happening in the United States, but it’s happening all over the world. People in Europe are having the same scams pulled on them too.”
Lieber said it’s hard to catch the people perpetrating this scam because they are often doing so from other countries, which makes finding them and prosecution difficult.
As with other digital scams, Lieber said elderly people are often at higher risk.
“The cognitive reasoning of older adults gets weaker and weaker,” he said. “In my opinion, it would have to be the family members of the victims. And they would have to look at the grandma’s financial statement and see, what’s this $5,000 charge for, grandma? So that’s really the key, is family members have to get involved and really study how grandma or grandpa are spending their money.”
However, younger people are not immune to scams, especially as generative AI improves.
“I found that the youngsters in their twenties and thirties they’re getting scammed also similarly and they don’t talk about it,” Lieber said. “They’re very embarrassed. But yeah, this is no longer just the over-65s … It’s getting all age levels.”
