Scammers are coupling increasingly convincing AI-generated documents, voice cloning and deep fakes with scare tactics and extortion to defraud victims.

“It’s financial warfare,” Erin West, founder and executive director of Operation Shamrock, a nonprofit organization that fights transnational cyber scams and financial exploitation, tells FinAi News on this episode of the “FinAi Podcast.”

“It is a full-scale attack on consumers,” she says. “The FBI says that $20 billion in internet scams was reported to them last year.

“Starting in 2020, we saw the trajectory take off, and it’s double-digit growth every year since then, with no signs of slowing.”

From large scam compounds in Southeast Asia to loose networks of individual scammers in West Africa, bad actors are using AI to trick victims and steal their money.

“They are using it to be able to produce anything and have it look letter-perfect,” West says.

“The technology is in such a place that it is very difficult to determine whether or not something is real or not real to the human eye,” she says.

Listen as West discusses varied fraud methods, what the financial sector should be doing to better protect customers and how AI has brought “sextortion” to teenage boys’ mobile phones.

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