Into the Great Beyond: AI and the Future of Fraud

Welcome to the October 2024 edition of our newsletter!  In this issue, we’ll examine how the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence is affecting both fraud and fraud fighting efforts.

So Like Us: How Artificial Intelligence Is Used in Scams and in Scam Detection

Artificial intelligence, unlike most humans, has no moral center, no learned or inherent sense of right or wrong – its sole goal is to carry out the operations fed into its prompts.  As such, it has become a valuable tool for myriad types of fraudsters and other criminals, whether tasked with pursuing denial of service attacks or analyzing social media to compile more convincing phishing attempts.

Yet those charged with detecting and preventing fraud are also using this new tool.  For instance, the society which handles international wire transfers recently announced that it is rolling out a fraud detection tool to help banks detect fraud in real time.  The next iteration of threats which banks will face may be the “cloning” of voices used as an extra layer of authentication.

Potential fraud victims can look for certain cues as to whether something was written by artificial intelligence.  Many AI-generated news articles use overly formal language, like that which is used by non-native speakers seeking to both increase their understanding of a language and to impress the listener.  Other signs of fraud can be part of the prompt initiated by the AI’s user, such as urgency in a plea for money via a social media post or e-mail.

As with most human endeavors, we’re leaping into a new frontier before we’ve taken a measured look at the horizon.  Caution and vigilance are key, as is a mentality to evolve solutions to problems as the risks also evolve, possibly exponentially given AI’s ability to absorb and analyze information at a nearly infinite pace.