How AI is changing online fraud May 13th

Just as we learned to ignore random dubious email requests from a self-described “Prince in a faraway land” seeking help recovering their lost fortune, those scams began to disappear. The same might soon happen to the latest generation of emails and text ruses, with its tell-tale conspicuous misspellings in the subject line, clashing fonts, and grammatical errors in the body of the message, which many people have learned are fraud attempts.

Online fraud is becoming more sophisticated by the minute, making it harder to distinguish legitimate offers or messages from people you trust from a potential scam. Scammers are embracing widely available Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and using them to get you to send money or share personal information for financial gain and/or identity theft.

“The scams aren’t necessarily different; they’re the same type of scams,” says Octavia Howell, vice-president and chief information security officer with Equifax Canada. But now fraudsters can instantaneously “scrape” social media and the web for information about an intended victim, create a profile of them, and craft a pitch likely to catch their attention and provoke a hasty response…