Speaker 1: I got an email once a number of years ago
Speaker 1: from somebody to say that they knew my password, and
Speaker 1: I actually mentioned what my password was, which was quite
Speaker 1: an old password. They said, I know this is your
Speaker 1: password if you don't get in touch with me, and
Speaker 1: pain that they would release videos ahead of me and
Speaker 1: pictures that they'd taken from my webcam and I know
Speaker 1: what you get up to in front of your webcam,
Speaker 1: all that sort of you know, insinuations. But what worried
Speaker 1: me initially was the fact that they had legitimate information
Speaker 1: about me in some way. But I contacted the I
Speaker 1: think I contacted the police actually and said to them,
Speaker 1: you know, should I be worried about this? And they said, no,
Speaker 1: we recognize that as a scam.
Speaker 2: We hear all the time about people being fooled by
Speaker 2: online scammers. You fall for a fake email or click
Speaker 2: on a link that looks legit but isn't. I've done it,
Speaker 2: even though I like to think of myself as world
Speaker 2: weary enough to tell the difference. But even as we
Speaker 2: all become more hardened against any kind of request for
Speaker 2: our information, the scam are coming up with more sophisticated
Speaker 2: ways to steal our identities. And our money, and no surprise,
Speaker 2: they're now getting a big helping hand from you guessed it,
Speaker 2: artificial intelligence. The financial industry is a prime target and
Speaker 2: banks are struggling to protect customers. Bloomberg's Nabila Ahmed and
Speaker 2: Adam Haig in Sydney have been reporting on how AI
Speaker 2: is transforming financial crime and what we can do to
Speaker 2: stay one step ahead.
Speaker 3: They're running a business too, and they're going for maximum profit,
Speaker 3: and unlike the banks, they're not bound by rules and regulations,
Speaker 3: so they're able to move a lot faster. And that's
Speaker 3: why the banks it seems like they're just a step
Speaker 3: behind and trying to catch up.
Speaker 4: This is an arms race of technological innovation, really, and
Speaker 4: if the scammers are one step ahead with a technology,
Speaker 4: then they're going to continue to keep winning.
Speaker 2: I'm Wescasova today on the big take Artificial intelligence, Real Money, Adam.
Speaker 2: In this story that you and Nobela rode with our
Speaker 2: colleagues Ainsley Thompson and Ellie Harmsworth, you talk about how
Speaker 2: artificial intelligence AI is changing the way people are falling
Speaker 2: victim to scams, and you're talking your reporting about this
Speaker 2: concept of social engineering scams. What exactly are those.
Speaker 4: I think this is just kind of like another element
Speaker 4: of how AI is gripping this change that we're seeing
Speaker 4: in scams and forgulent payments. So social engineering is kind
Speaker 4: of just another way to phrase what's happening in the
Speaker 4: way that they're getting access to people through the multitudes
Speaker 4: of different ways that they can do that. So one
Speaker 4: of those is coming at you directly through Facebook and
Speaker 4: WhatsApp and those kind of places. But really the next
Speaker 4: level is how AI is being used to essentially replicate
Speaker 4: people who may be close to you in your lives,
Speaker 4: so they can pretend to be someone that you know,
Speaker 4: and they can use that as a way to kind
Speaker 4: of play on your emotions and be able to get
Speaker 4: access to your money and your funds. Your identity essentially
Speaker 4: feels like it's no longer safe, especially once you've been
Speaker 4: out there either talking or you know, everyone has a
Speaker 4: voicemail message that can be used to get a realistic
Speaker 4: interpretation of what your voice is. As the example with
Speaker 4: the fake masks and how they're used with the three
Speaker 4: D printing to create fake IDs, like it shows that
Speaker 4: you've just got so much information out there on the
Speaker 4: Internet through all sorts of social media platforms that we
Speaker 4: all use and everyone uses on a day to day basis.
Speaker 2: Nibela. We've had phishing scams for a long time where
Speaker 2: someone will pretend to be someone you know or somebody
Speaker 2: in your email phone book if you can starts emailing
Speaker 2: you and you kind of know it's not them. How
Speaker 2: are these different?
Speaker 3: The US Federal Trade Commission, which has been really trying
Speaker 3: to look into this space and protect consumers, has been
Speaker 3: saying that AI is being used to turbocharge fraud, and
Speaker 3: that's what we're seeing here, is that artificial intelligence is
Speaker 3: being used to clone people's voices to make it sound
Speaker 3: like them. To really refine these attacks. In the case
Speaker 3: of the ones where people are calling up, say I'm
Speaker 3: calling you pretending to be your child, and I've actually
Speaker 3: downloaded their voice from the internet, mostly from social media accounts.
Speaker 3: A lot of people now have open public social media accounts,
Speaker 3: so it's very easy to get snippets of people's voice.
Speaker 3: They only need about twenty the thirty seconds, so it's
Speaker 3: not very much, and they can put it through a
Speaker 3: synthesizer that you can buy on the internet, or you
Speaker 3: could even get free ones where it allows you to
Speaker 3: clone that person's voice and gets it to say whatever
Speaker 3: you want it to say.
Speaker 5: So we've had cases where.
Speaker 3: Children ringing up their parents asking for money or saying,
Speaker 3: you know, I'm stark, I'm a school excursion, the bus
Speaker 3: is broken down. I really need money to pay for
Speaker 3: an uber or pay for a taxi whatever, Please.
Speaker 5: Can I have that money?
Speaker 3: And in that moment, when you hear your child in distress,
Speaker 3: it's very hard for the target of these scams to
Speaker 3: decipher and to stop and think, pause and think is
Speaker 3: this really my child?
Speaker 5: Are they really in trouble? What should I do here?
Speaker 2: How widespread a problem is this? How many people are
Speaker 2: getting scammed using these new technologies.
Speaker 3: It's hard to tell how many are getting scammed using
Speaker 3: the new technologies. We know that the number of people
Speaker 3: getting scammed and that amount of money that people are
Speaker 3: losing is just going up and up and up. For example,
Speaker 3: in the US last year, consumers lost about eight point
Speaker 3: eight billion dollars, which was up forty four percent from
Speaker 3: the year before. Of those, the investment scams are some
Speaker 3: of the fastest growing ones. But AI is being used
Speaker 3: in all kinds of different scams, so it's really hard
Speaker 3: to pass through exactly you know what percentage of scams
Speaker 3: are using AI, But we just know that it's a
Speaker 3: new tool that's available to fraudsters and they're using it
Speaker 3: in more and more innovative ways.
Speaker 2: What are some of the most popular scams, like ways
Speaker 2: of extracting money from people.
Speaker 3: So one really good example that we got from one
Speaker 3: of the banks that we were talking to, they had
Speaker 3: a customer who lost about seven hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 3: dollars through one.
Speaker 5: Of these investment scams.
Speaker 3: So this was a guy who had worked in finance,
Speaker 3: who was coming towards the end of his career, and
Speaker 3: he decided that he wanted to do some of his
Speaker 3: own investments, and he took a lot of his money
Speaker 3: and put them into a bond fund, you know, it's
Speaker 3: meant to be safe, and it was pretty good yielding.
Speaker 3: And he found this fund on the internet. So he
Speaker 3: did a search engine search at Google Search and it
Speaker 3: popped up with this particular investment company. Looked pretty legit,
Speaker 3: and as he looked into it more and more. And
Speaker 3: remember this is a guy who worked in finance himself,
Speaker 3: so he's a little bit familiar with the language. So
Speaker 3: he looked at the site they had regular prospectuses, they
Speaker 3: had updates. They would send him quarterly updates talking about
Speaker 3: how his investments were doing, and it was showing that
Speaker 3: it was going really well. So he kept investing more
Speaker 3: and more, and it was I think a year or
Speaker 3: two later when he went to actually withdraw that money
Speaker 3: and cash in on his profits that he realized that
Speaker 3: it was all.
Speaker 2: Fake and nobila. One of the ways where AI is
Speaker 2: used for a financial fraud is to simply make investment
Speaker 2: websites that look exactly like the real ones we use.
Speaker 3: That's exactly right. You know, we're all familiar with chat GPT.
Speaker 3: If you type into that that you want to have
Speaker 3: a prospectus written for somebody that works in the financial
Speaker 3: industry and write it from the perspective of a financial
Speaker 3: investment firm, it.
Speaker 5: Does a pretty good job. It actually does a pretty
Speaker 5: scarily good job.
Speaker 3: So AI is being used to really refine the language
Speaker 3: and refine the look and feel of these prospectuses and
Speaker 3: financial updates so that investors find it difficult to figure
Speaker 3: out what's real and what's fake.
Speaker 4: So what we're really seeing is that AI is being
Speaker 4: used in many different areas of scams across the spectrum
Speaker 4: which includes all sorts from romance scams to voice scams
Speaker 4: where they take your voice and pretend to be someone else.
Speaker 4: ID based scams where they're taking another form of ID
Speaker 4: such as your face and pretending to be you.
Speaker 2: And you talked about how much this is costing consumers.
Speaker 2: What about the financial institutions that are also getting scammed
Speaker 2: when all these accounts are being hacked.
Speaker 3: More broadly, when you look at cybercrime costs, which includes scams,
Speaker 3: they're set to hit eight trillion dollars this year, which
Speaker 3: if it were a country, it would be the third
Speaker 3: largest economy in the world today. By twenty twenty five,
Speaker 3: the projections are that it will reach ten and a
Speaker 3: half trillion dollars, which would mean that they would have
Speaker 3: tripled in a decade. So there are some staggering numbers here.
Speaker 3: And Microsoft put together some numbers for this story that
Speaker 3: we're working on, and I'm just going to reel some
Speaker 3: of them off here because they're just so incredible. Twenty
Speaker 3: two billion is the number of records dolen by hackers
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty two. Twelve one hundred and eighty seven
Speaker 3: is a number of password attacks per second in the world,
Speaker 3: just in about that. One thy two hundred and eighty
Speaker 3: seven fifty six is the average number of days between
Speaker 3: the time a scammer infiltrates your system and that infiltration
Speaker 3: is detected. Seven to two is the minutes the median
Speaker 3: time for an attacker to access your private data if
Speaker 3: you fall victim to a phishing email. Five hundred thousand
Speaker 3: is the number of new mailware variants that are being
Speaker 3: created every day, and three point four million is a
Speaker 3: global shortage of skilled security workers. So you can see
Speaker 3: that there's an uphill battle here for sure.
Speaker 2: After the break, who's responsible if you fall victim to
Speaker 2: a scammer?
Speaker 6: I was out on holiday in abi's Abi and I
Speaker 6: got a notification on my phone that my car had
Speaker 6: been used to try and book some flights with South
Speaker 6: African Airways. Obviously, I thought that was a little bit
Speaker 6: unusual given that I was on holiday, So they must
Speaker 6: have taken a picture or someone who must have seen
Speaker 6: my card details and then tried to plug it in online,
Speaker 6: because when I called up my credit card company, it
Speaker 6: was American Express. They were really good and they managed
Speaker 6: to cancelorf and I wasn't charged or anything like that.
Speaker 6: They were also tried to make a booking through booking
Speaker 6: dot com or Trevago or something like that. They were
Speaker 6: trying to get a hotel as well, and they didn't
Speaker 6: manage to get through on that one. It was great
Speaker 6: that I had this you know that feature on your
Speaker 6: phone where it says when you purchased something. I immediately
Speaker 6: called them and they sort it out straight away, Adam.
Speaker 2: So now we know that a lot of people are
Speaker 2: getting scammed and a lot of money is being the last.
Speaker 2: So who pays for it when somebody loses a bunch
Speaker 2: of money, who's on the hook?
Speaker 4: Well, who exactly pays and who's responsible varies a lot
Speaker 4: from country to country, but obviously no one wants to
Speaker 4: take all of the hit hit. So basically what you
Speaker 4: have is a situation where there's lots of discussions and
Speaker 4: disagreement around where the responsibility lies. So it isn't a
Speaker 4: clear cut thing. Obviously, if you've been victim of a
Speaker 4: if you know someone's stolen your credit card, they've copied it,
Speaker 4: the bank's pretty much going to give your money back.
Speaker 4: In that kind of situation, where it becomes a bit
Speaker 4: tricky is when you get tricked into making a payment
Speaker 4: and that's where the responsibility is a little bit less clear.
Speaker 4: So obviously, in a lot of scams, you are almost
Speaker 4: by definition being tricked. So the difficulty then lies around
Speaker 4: how the bank determines what's happened during the process. And
Speaker 4: in places like the US and the UK, the onus
Speaker 4: is moving on to banks taking more responsibility to reimburse
Speaker 4: customers that have lost money through scams. But what we're
Speaker 4: seeing is a big change in this area and a
Speaker 4: lot of political capital now being spent on trying to
Speaker 4: hold a bigger group of organizations responsible, so not just banks,
Speaker 4: but also in some of these AI scams that are
Speaker 4: involving tech platforms, for example, there's an argument now that
Speaker 4: tech firms should have to stump up more for losses
Speaker 4: in this area as well.
Speaker 3: If you ask the banks, they'll tell you who's not paying,
Speaker 3: and that's big Tech. And banks around the world are
Speaker 3: very vexed about this because they want big Tech to
Speaker 3: be held more responsible for some of these scams that
Speaker 3: are being hosted on their sites. So Adam mentioned the
Speaker 3: investment scams, but also fake websites for online shopping for example,
Speaker 3: that are popping up, and telecom companies or others that
Speaker 3: banks think should be doing more to help block numbers
Speaker 3: that are sending those phishing techs for example, or those
Speaker 3: messages that they send where they say you forgot to
Speaker 3: pay your toll, please click this link. They want telecom
Speaker 3: companies to disable those kinds of links and tackle the
Speaker 3: problem at its route.
Speaker 2: When are consumers on the hook to pay?
Speaker 3: I mean, that's the big question, because consumers themselves. So far,
Speaker 3: you know, we've been used to credit card. For example,
Speaker 3: somebody steals a credit card, they use that to buy
Speaker 3: I don't know, one thousand bubblegum machines or something somewhere,
Speaker 3: and you know it wasn't you, and the bank says, okay,
Speaker 3: you can have your money back because we know that
Speaker 3: was fortunant. So credit card fraud is unauthorized fraud because
Speaker 3: you haven't allowed that to happen. But right now, what
Speaker 3: we're seeing globally is that authorized fraud is actually surpassing
Speaker 3: unauthorized fraud. So that's where somebody has tricked you into
Speaker 3: giving up your money voluntarily. And in that instance, you know,
Speaker 3: so far, banks are still paying out to a large degree,
Speaker 3: but at some point, I guess you know, they would
Speaker 3: really like consumers to take more responsibility. But it's very,
Speaker 3: very difficult because you know, we've been saying how AI
Speaker 3: is making it so much harder to discern what is
Speaker 3: real and what is fake.
Speaker 2: Is it realistic to say that the tech companies should
Speaker 2: police this? Do they have the tools to do this?
Speaker 2: And they're simply not doing it?
Speaker 4: Ultimately, this is about whether these firms want to spend
Speaker 4: more money, more time weeding out what's real and what
Speaker 4: isn't on their platforms, And of course they can do it.
Speaker 4: There's varying degrees of how difficult that is to do it,
Speaker 4: but it requires more time and more resources and more staff,
Speaker 4: so ultimately it costs more money. So it comes down
Speaker 4: to a simple equation on cost. Ultimately, if they want
Speaker 4: to spend more of their dollars on getting a grip
Speaker 4: on this, then that's one choice. The other choice is
Speaker 4: not to spend as much time and money on this,
Speaker 4: and that's another choice.
Speaker 2: When we come back, what can we do to protect ourselves? Adam.
Speaker 2: One thing you write about is that is the banks
Speaker 2: try to keep up with the scammers. The scammers are
Speaker 2: trying to stay one step ahead and change the way
Speaker 2: they do things.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a constant arms race going on here between
Speaker 4: just a kind of keeping a competitive edge. So as
Speaker 4: every kind of new technology evolves, of course you're trying
Speaker 4: to catch up and you're trying to kind of prevent
Speaker 4: the next thing from happening. But you're always catching up.
Speaker 4: You're always trying to kind of stay one step ahead
Speaker 4: of the game. But of course they're typically a step
Speaker 4: or two behind the game, and the scammers are the
Speaker 4: ones that a step ahead. So it's a constant effort
Speaker 4: to try and to learn more, to understand what's going
Speaker 4: on with the latest technology, and then to try and
Speaker 4: have a plan to fight back against it. But it's
Speaker 4: very clear from all the reporting that there's this sense
Speaker 4: of skepticism and this sense that this isn't something that's winnable.
Speaker 4: This is an arms race of technological innovation, really, and
Speaker 4: if the scammers are one step ahead with a technology,
Speaker 4: then they're going to continue to keep winning.
Speaker 3: So there were four of us reporting on this story
Speaker 3: around the world, and we all heard from our sources
Speaker 3: that it's just like Adam says, it's an arms race
Speaker 3: and it's hard to win, but also that they all
Speaker 3: have to now start pulling their resources a lot more
Speaker 3: banks and tech companies they all have to ban together
Speaker 3: because they just can't be as nimble as these scammers.
Speaker 3: You know, you shut down a scammer call center and
Speaker 3: another one pops.
Speaker 5: Up the next week.
Speaker 3: They're like big businesses, right, So a lot of these
Speaker 3: people we spoke to said, look, they're running a business too,
Speaker 3: and they're going for maximum profit, and unlike the banks,
Speaker 3: they're not bound by rules and regulations, so they're able
Speaker 3: to move a lot faster. And that's why the banks
Speaker 3: it's seems like they're just a step behind and trying
Speaker 3: to catch up.
Speaker 2: We touched a little bit on what governments are trying
Speaker 2: to do to get their arms around this. Adam, what
Speaker 2: kind of government regulation is in the works.
Speaker 4: Well, I think really what you need to see from
Speaker 4: governments is more of a coordinated action around how they're
Speaker 4: trying to tackle this. But of course, governments can only
Speaker 4: step in if the private sector is doing their utmost
Speaker 4: in a coordinated way to try and tackle this problem.
Speaker 4: And I think that's kind of what you're seeing now,
Speaker 4: is that governments are trying to get the private sector
Speaker 4: to talk to each other. They recognize that this spans
Speaker 4: across different parts of the economy. It's not just banks,
Speaker 4: or it's not just technology firms. It's a whole swathe
Speaker 4: of different companies that need to share information about how
Speaker 4: to tackle this together with governments if they're going to
Speaker 4: really tackle this and crack down on it.
Speaker 2: I can imagine a lot of people listening to this
Speaker 2: podcast saying to themselves, oh, great, So if no one
Speaker 2: seems to know how to stop this, how am I
Speaker 2: supposed to protect myself from scammers? When the technology is
Speaker 2: getting so good.
Speaker 3: I think we all can be a lot more vigilant
Speaker 3: and just tidier about how we handle ourselves on the internet.
Speaker 3: Just make sure that before you authorize any kind of
Speaker 3: payment to anybody that you don't know that is not
Speaker 3: an immediate family member that's already in your log of
Speaker 3: accounts that you do send money to, just stop and
Speaker 3: check for a sec It's very very easy to fall
Speaker 3: victim to one of these scams. It's very very easy
Speaker 3: to click that phishing email. In fact, I did it
Speaker 3: last week because I thought it was a work email,
Speaker 3: and as I went to click it, I thought, hang
Speaker 3: on a second, so I like shut down the site
Speaker 3: before it loaded, but I did click on it. You know,
Speaker 3: it's just really easy to fall victim, so we all
Speaker 3: just have to be so hyper vigilant.
Speaker 5: That's the best way to do it.
Speaker 3: And set up as many of those kinds of checks
Speaker 3: and balances for yourself as you can. You know, maybe
Speaker 3: only transfer money to accounct are already vetted and that
Speaker 3: you already have in your address book for example. You know,
Speaker 3: be careful when you're dealing with crypto exchanges and sending
Speaker 3: money over crypto.
Speaker 2: Nobila Adam, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 5: Thanks Wez, It's been really great.
Speaker 4: Thanks has been great to be with you.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take.
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