'Greeting cards, fake offers': This festive season, beware of AI-based online scamsters
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Scamsters are also forwarding e-greeting cards during festivals. Photograph: (ANI representational)
How scamsters exploit emotions to defraud people: Scamsters are using artificial intelligence and employing innovative techniques to trap their victims.
Online scamsters have devised several new traps to defraud people during the festive season. Using artificial intelligence, the swanky new technology that has been attracting the bulk of investments in the famed Silicon Valley, the cyber thugs have invented more personal and targeted attacks at a time when the masses tend to spend more.
How scamsters exploit emotions to defraud people
For instance, a woman in Mumbai was asked to pay Rs 6,000 for a food processor by a WhatsApp account. The accountbore the photograph of her roommate. The woman said she paid because her roommate had been thinking of buyinga food processor online.
Sneha Katkar, head of product strategy at Quick Heal Technologies, told ET that scamsters have now been employing generative AI to create customised and contextual plots to defraud unsuspecting targets. She further said that scamsters can defraud a person if they have enough information to prove that they are authentic.
Quick Heal stated that 15% of 2024’s attacks were based on behaviors.
McAfee’s survey said people mostly get scammed throughphishing links via email and SMS.
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Scamsters have also spread AI-generated celebrity endorsements with deals on top products.
McAfee has noticed a 40% increase in such scams in the festive months compared to the previous quarter.
Jaydeep Singh, general manager, India at Kaspersky, said that advanced persistent threat (APT) groups run like corporations, providing malware as a service.
Katkar said that scamsters are also forwarding e-greeting cards during festivals. These cards are usually trojans that send random messages to the victim's contacts, asking for money from them, posing as the victim.