Fraud tactics and the growing prevalence of AI scams

No doubt everyone is familiar with receiving spam phone calls. In the first six months of 2024, researchers flagged over 100 million spam calls delivered on a daily basis. Robocalling, made with recorded voices or with voice to text, is a significant component of what makes this possible, but newer technologies are making this practice still more dangerous through the power of deepfakes. AI-based scams, such as a spam call that circulated during the US primary presidential election using an AI recreation of Joe Biden’s voice, are able to invest scams with trusted authority that they couldn’t otherwise obtain. While this may seem like a small thing, it can have great effect against the uninitiated and trusting general population.

This technology is facilitating different spam in different nations. In America, the most common scams are Medicare and insurance related, followed by other insurance scams, such as auto, home, and life insurance. Tax scams were also common. In Europe, particularly in France and Spain, utility and mobile phone sales scams were the most common, along with banking and package delivery scams. Brazilians received the most spam calls by far, with a large percentage of them impersonating banks. In Canada,Amazon scams were the most popular in both 2023 and the first half of 2024.