Staffordshire consumers are being warned to be alert to increased risks from fraudsters as criminals turn to AI to make their scams more believable.
With advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), criminals are becoming more sophisticated with their scams, using software to make themselves more convincing. Examples include Deepfakes - using video, convincing voice cloning and phishing messages, all of which are worrying trading standards officers.
Deepfakes, using video cloning software to create fake video content, is used to produce bogus celebrity endorsements and messaging. This tries to fool consumers into believing a bogus or non-existent product is genuine.
Voice cloning is similar to deepfake videos and uses voice cloning to create artificial voice recordings from samples of speech. Again, criminals will create phoney messages that can be used in conjunction with existing scams, such as the WhatsApp “hi mum” messaging fraud.
Advice on spotting and reporting scams is available on the Citizens Advice Consumer service website.
Scams