As AI is adopted across industries, it’s also being taken up by scammers.Around 6% of U.S.
adults, or around 15 million people, were scammed out of money last year, a new Gallup and Stop Scams Alliance survey finds, and victims reported that 12% of those scams involved AI or deepfakes.Limited time: Save 25% on NBC News subscriptionGet exclusive reporting, live Q&As and ad-free reading.“These guys aren’t called organized crime for nothing.They’re actually organized, and they’re using their organization to start attacking us with scale now to a tune of $68 billion, which is like the annual revenues of Delta Airlines.
It’s like a Fortune 500 company.It’s huge,” Stop Scams Alliance founder and CEO Ken Westbrook told NBC News.
The Stop Scams Alliance is a nonprofit organization that aims to reduce scams in the U.S.The survey of 5,173 U.S.adult respondents in January through February, which relied on participants’ self-reporting their scam experiences, said that “the use of AI may be difficult to detect by scam victims.”But Westbrook noted that the results align with other signs of the burgeoning issue of AI-fueled scams.
In March, Interpol warned that AI could enhance and fuel fraud.“Enabled by artificial intelligence, low-cost digital tools and increased global criminal collaboration, we are witnessing the industrialization of fraud,” Secretary General Valdecy Urquiza said.AI companies, including OpenAI, have periodically also released reports documenting the use of their platforms by scammers.
In February, OpenAI released a report documenting attempts to use its technologies to commit fraud and scams around the world, including one instance targeting people who were already victims of scams with faked advertisements for “scam recovery” services.In total, the Gallup and Stop Scams Alliance survey found that Americans lost $68 billion to scams last year.The survey helps fill in a picture of the scale of scamming in the U.S., Westbr...