Combatting the Rise of AI Fraud: Your Action Plan

Jennifer DeStefano, a concerned mother, received a call from an unidentified number, a decision she normally avoided unless necessary. Her choice was influenced by concern for her daughter, who was currently away on a ski trip, raising the possibility of an urgent situation.

The voice on the other end, filled with panic and immediately recognizable as her daughter, exclaimed about a mishap. As Jennifer inquired anxiously, background noises suggested distress, intensifying her worry. Subsequently, a male voice intervened, claiming he had abducted her daughter and demanding a ransom of $1 million.

This alarming situation led Jennifer to believe her daughter was indeed in peril, until a subsequent conversation with her daughter revealed she was unharmed. The incident was a fraudulent scheme, made alarmingly credible by advanced artificial intelligence capable of replicating human voices.

This event underscores the increasingly integral role AI is playing in our daily lives, evolving from simple voice assistants to more sophisticated applications in various domains, including autonomous vehicles and advanced productivity tools, shaping both present and future landscapes.

But like any technology, AI has a dark side. What can help you in powerful ways can also be used to take advantage of you in powerful new ways, and scammers are exploring how to use these tools to do just that.

This isn’t just in our personal lives. Businesses have perhaps the most to worry about because they’re the biggest targets for phishing scams and other, newer methods of AI fraud.

But you can fight these new attacks by staying informed and putting the right methods in place.

In this article, we’ll explain some of the new ways AI is being used for dark purposes and how you can counteract them.

The New Frontier of Fraud

As the terrifying story above illustrates, one of the new ways AI can be used for fraud is with the creation of realistic synthetic identities.

This isn’t just with cloning voices. AI can be used to fabricate IDs like passports and corporate badges, making it easier for a scammer to fake their way through a company’s security procedures.

Scammers can also use the technology to boost methods they were already using, such as creating phishing emails. With AI, a scammer can create phishing email campaigns at scale and send them using realistic fictitious identities they’ve created so that they’re harder to detect.

Voice cloning and other biometric, meaning personal, information can be used to fool banks into transferring money or by scammers to place bets on betting platforms in someone else’s name.

The list goes on. If there is a way to scam someone using AI, you can trust that someone somewhere will find it.

So, how do you stay ahead of such a dizzying array of threats?

Turning the Tide Against AI Fraud

Build awareness in both yourself and your employees. You can’t fight what you ignore. The businesses with the most to lose are banks, so they’re a good place to look for guidance.

Most banks try to keep their employees and customers informed of the latest frauds, so make frequent awareness a core part of your routine. This can be through simple pop-up messages to customers detailing what to look for, along with emails keeping them up to date.

For your employees, this can take the form of awareness sessions where they learn how to spot phishing scams and other frauds. They are the front line of your business. Keep them vigilant.

Be proactive with your cybersecurity measures. Make use of real-time or even part-time transaction monitoring to flag suspicious individuals and transactions. Employ two-factor authentication to try and keep fake identities from having access to your services.

Last, fight fire with fire by embracing AI as part of your cybersecurity suite. Just as it can be used by scammers to create fake identities and build huge phishing scams, it can be used to detect those identities and scams.

AI can detect account takeovers and fake account creation, and help prevent credit card fraud by using advanced machine learning to spot patterns many humans would miss. It can also spot credential stuffing and the use of bots.

Depending on your business, it might be worth building an AI that’s attuned to your specific risks. Doing so could make your cybersecurity even more precise and effective.

AI isn’t going anywhere. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global artificial intelligence market size is projected to grow from $515.31 billion in 2023 to $2,025.12 billion by 2030. This is huge growth, akin to the growth of the internet.

The more it grows, the easier it will be for scammers to use it, and the more powerful their methods will become. It makes creating fake identities a breeze and implementing phishing campaigns a simple process.

Fighting it takes vigilance and using new, powerful AI tools yourself to stay ahead of the scammers. Our iLOCK360 service delivers top-of-the-line credit monitoring and identity theft protection. Click here to learn more about iLOCK360.