Scammer poses as friend using AI face-swapping tech, makes man pay $600K

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has now very much becomepart of our lives. In our imagination previously, the concept was limited to scary-looking robots trying to topple humanity. But the true power of AI is on display now as it subtly becomes part of our lives and daily tech use. ChatGPT has already shown that AI can write essays, poetry, code and much much more.

But for a man in northern China, the brush with the most modern technology was not exactly anexciting experience. He was scammed, and in a big way. The scammer made use of a sophisticated "deepfake" to make him cough up more than $600K. Deepfakes are artificially generated photos or videos that bear striking resemblance to the actual person. The scammer posed as a friend of the man using AI-powered face-swapping technology.

The incident took place in Baotou, in the region of Inner Mongolia in China. The perpetrator made a video call to the man and asked him to transfer 4.4 million yuan ($622,000). The man, thinking that it was his friend who was asking him for money (all the while looking at his 'face' generated by AI-powered technology), made the transfer. He thought that his friend was in a bidding process and was in dire need of the amount.

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Reuters reported that the man only realised that he had been scammed when his 'friend' expressed ignorance of the situation.

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Luckily for him, the police were able to recover most of the stolen funds. However, part of the money is still being traced.

The case understandably sparked discussion on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. People spoke about online privacy and security with the hashtag '#AI scams are exploding across the country'. Reuters reported that on Monday, the hashtag had gained more than 120 million views.

"This shows that photos, voices and videos all can be utilised by scammers," one user wrote, as reported by Reuters.

"Can information security rules keep up with these people's techniques?"

AI scams on the rise

This is not the first time Artificial Intelligence has been used to dupe people. A report by WKYT, a US-based news channel with affiliation to CBS News revealed how a woman in Arizona got a call from an unknown number saying that her daughter was kidnapped. The woman told the channel that when she picked up the phone, she heard her daughter say 'Mom'.

“It was never a question of who is this? It was completely her voice. It was her inflexion. It was the way she would have cried,” she told the news outlet and added, “I never doubted for one second it was her. That’s the freaky part that really got me to my core.”

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Her daughter was on a skiing trip at the time.

A man's voice threatened the woman to not go to the police and pay him onemillion dollars for her daughter's release.

It turned out that her daughter was safe and not in danger at all.

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