As if the proliferation and sophistication of scams on the internet weren’t already enough, AI technologies are already making them more common, and harder to spot. Old scams can now be automated en masse, and entirely new scams are possible thanks to the latest AI tech.
Now, you can add AI-powered “catfishing” to the list, as scammers employ AI to break hearts and bank accounts at the same time.
Catfishing Has Always Been Dangerous
The most effective scams have always been the ones that target strong human emotions. If you appeal to someone’s greed, loneliness, or lust, there’s a good chance you’ll diminish their critical thinking capacity, and make it easier to get compliance from them that seems irrational to outsiders.
That’s why catfishing has always been both one of the cruelest and most effective forms of online fraud. In a catfishing scam, you meet someone online and form an emotional relationship with them. Only later, will it turn out that this person never existed. It’s someone pretending to be this person, fooling you into having real feelings for a fake person.
More often than not, this is a romantic relationship made with the aim of getting money from you, but some scammers do it just for fun or for some form of wish fulfillment. It’s not always a romantic type of relationship either. It can be anything from a new friendship to a new business partner that’s just made up from someone’s imagination.
Now AI Has Perfected It
Catfishing’s only real limitation is that it’s not easy to pull off. The scammer needs to put in a lot of time and effort to make it work, and often spends months on their mark before extorting them. It takes just a single slip-up for the scammer to be exposed, and a common way to expose a catfish is to insist on, for example, a live video call.
Unfortunately, several AI tools and technologies now make it easy for this scam to be rolled out on a larger scale. AI video is easy to generate, and with the advent of technology like Google’s VEO 3, we can automatically generate audio to go with that video. You can use that technology to make hilarious Bigfoot videos or you can use it to create fake people to scam hapless internet users.
You can also do real-time facial deep fakes with AI-powered voice changing to fake being someone else on a live video call.
Doing just the voice-changing bit is so easy these days anyone can do it, so if you can limit yourself to voice calls, you can really scam people to your heart’s content, and you don’t even have to do it yourself. Just employ a suitably-trained chatbot to speak to your victims in real time.
The only thing you need is the software and the computer equipment to make it feasible, and you could be sitting back while your army of fake AI people spend months worming their way into the hearts of humans who just have no idea.
You Need to Talk to Vulnerable Family and Friends
Just like I advised with AI voice cloning scams in general, the most important weapon here is to be aware that the technology exists. Many people who fall for these scams didn’t know it was possible to fake an entire person’s online life with realistic video, photos, and live interaction. If you don’t know it’s possible, why would you ever stop to think things are a little suspicious? The fact is that for a lot of people, their online street smarts are simply out of date.
Talk to your parents, your children, your friends, or anyone in your life that doesn’t follow the latest tech news. No one is safe from AI-powered scams, and to be fore-warned is to be fore-armed, as the saying goes.
Be Hyper-Vigilant With Online Dating
While AI catfishing can strike in any walk of life, I think online dating is probably one of the most important places to take special precautions. These dating apps are an extremely popular way to look for romantic partners these days, but some people may take a long time to move from the online phase to the in-person meeting phase. Indeed, if you swipe right on someone that lives too far away to actually progress beyond online, then you’re in real danger of being catfished.
They might want to move you to another platform (like Whatsapp or another encrypted app) as soon as possible, and then the work of getting their virtual claws in can begin. So my only real advice is to limit yourself to people where meeting in person can happen, and try to facilitate that sooner rather than later—keeping all the other normal online dating safety precautions on mind!