How To Protect Yourself From AI Fraud and Scams in Banking

By Louis DeNicola

PUBLISHED May 29
|
4 MINUTE READ

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how people and banks need to think about scams and fraud. You can't necessarily trust what you see or hear, and criminals are experimenting with different ways to use AI to trick you into sending them money or sharing access to your bank account. You also have to watch out for scammers who are after your personal information, which they can sell or use to steal your identity.

How Scammers Use AI To Commit Fraud and Scams

Hackers and larger crime groups could use different types of AI to build tools and power large attacks that target financial institutions directly. But when scammers target individuals, they're primarily using generative AI to create content. Five ways they can use AI are to:

• Clone voices: Scammers can use AI to mimic or clone someone's voice after uploading a short clip of the person speaking. They can do this with politicians, celebrities and other public figures. They might even try to mimic your family, friends or executives at your company.
Create deepfakes: Scammers might create deepfakes (AI-generated images and videos of people) for many types of scams. For example, they might use these when creating social media profiles of fake people. Or, they could create deepfake videos of well-known people promoting their scam products, services or investments.
• Generate text: Whether it's a description under an image or video, a text message, an email or a script for a phone call, many scams involve written text. Using AI, scammers can quickly generate text that sounds natural and doesn't have the typos or grammatical errors that used to be clues.
• Build websites: Scammers might create websites that look like a bank's website or an e-commerce store. They use these to collect people's login and payment information. The sites frequently get shut down, and AI might help them create better-looking sites even faster.
• Power chatbots: AI chatbots can be used to message and chat with people via text and social media. Scammers can then target more people at once, perhaps only getting involved once the chatbot receives several responses from the victim.

Common AI Fraud and Scams in Banking

AI hasn't led to many new types of fraud or scams. Instead, criminals use the technology to enhance existing scams and target more people.

• Phishing attacks powered by AI: The scammer could send you an AI-generated phishing email that looks like it's coming from your bank and tries to scare you by saying your account was compromised. You might be prompted to click a link to change your password or verify your account. However, the link downloads malware that infects your computer and records what you type. Or, it leads to a scam website that collects your personal and login information.
• Smishing and vishing attacks powered by AI: These are similar to phishing scams, but the person sends a text (called smishing, for SMS phishing) or makes a call (called vishing, for voice phishing). They might use an AI chatbot for the text messages and an AI-powered robocaller to call people en masse.
• Investment and giveaway scams with deepfakes: Scammers have created images and videos of celebrities discussing new benefits programs, investment opportunities and giveaways. The videos get posted and promoted online.
• AI-powered grandparent scams: Scammers often call seniors, pretend to be their grandchildren and ask for money for bail, a ransom or another emergency. These scams may be more convincing if the scammer can clone a person's voice. Also, despite the name, scammers could target anyone and pretend to be their friend, child, parent or distant relative.
• AI romance scams: Romance scams happen when the scammer starts a relationship with the victim online and keeps it up until they're close friends or romantically involved. The scammers might use AI chatbots to start the scam. They could also send the victim deepfake images and videos, and some can even create live deepfakes for video calls.

Tips To Protect Yourself From AI Fraud and Scams

You can learn to protect yourself by identifying signs of AI fraud and scams, and adding security measures to your online accounts.

• Stop, take a breath and get a second opinion: Scammers use intimidation and fear to get victims to react quickly without thinking through their actions. One of the best things you can do is take a deep breath and try to slow down. It also doesn't hurt to contact a friend or family member and ask them if the situation sounds legitimate or fishy.
• Be wary of unsolicited communications: Treat every unsolicited email, text, phone call and direct message as suspicious, especially if the message is about your bank account or credit card. For example, Synchrony will never email you to ask for information—especially not your personal information.
• Hang up and call back: If someone is asking you for personal information, hang up, stop responding or ignore the email, and look up the organization's contact information on your own. Then, reach out to whatever organization the person claimed to represent and ask if there really is an issue. Legitimate government agencies and banks understand the need to be cautious and won't mind the request.
• Avoid offers that seem too good to be true: A great investment scheme, easy high-paying job, unknown government benefit, new tax credit or huge sale might seem great. Unfortunately, that probably means it's also a scam—especially if you learn about it from a celebrity on social media.
• Monitor your bank accounts and credit: Regularly check your bank accounts, and create alerts to spot unusual activity. You can also use a credit monitoring service to get alerted when someone applies for credit or opens a new account in your name.
• Keep your personal information private: Try to limit what you share on social media, and increase your accounts' security settings to keep people you don't know from seeing your posts.
• Use unique passwords and turn on multifactor authentication: Use a strong and unique password for each online account—don't use a similar pattern or combination for the passwords. Also, enable multifactor authentication, which can help keep a scammer out of your online account even if they learn your username and password.

What To Do If You Suspect AI Fraud or Scams

If you fall for a scam and send the scammer your information or money, there are a few things you can do:

• Contact your financial institution: If you sent a payment or shared your login information with the scammer, contact the financial institution right away. The institution can help you secure your account, and it might be able to reverse some types of transactions. You may also want to change your username, password and secret questions.
• File a scam report with the FTC: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) tracks scam reports and helps warn other people about new scams and trends. You can report the scam at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
• Report the scam to the police: You may also want to report the scam or fraud to the police department. The resulting police report might be helpful when you're reporting the fraud or scam to other organizations and trying to get your money back.
• File an identity theft report: If the scammer has your personal information, you can file a report with the FTC on IdentityTheft.gov. Based on your report, the website will generate a recovery plan with steps you can take to recover and secure your identity. It will also create an FTC Identity Theft Report that you can use in place of a police report in some situations.
• Freeze your credit reports: Freezing your credit reports with Experian, Equifax and TransUnion can help keep someone from opening a new credit account in your name. You can freeze and unfreeze your reports for free, but you'll need to freeze each of your reports separately.

Synchrony Helps Protect Customers From Fraud

Synchrony Bank has various defensive measures in place to help detect and stop scammers and fraudsters. For example, we take steps to verify and confirm people's identity when they open accounts, when they sign in to an online account and before approving certain transactions. We also actively monitor accounts for suspicious transactions and ask consumers to verify transactions.

Louis DeNicola is a freelance writer who specializes in consumer credit, finances and fraud. He has several credit-related certifications and works with many lenders, publishers, credit bureaus, Fortune 500s and fintech startups. Outside of work, you can often find Louis at his local climbing gym or cooking up a storm in the kitchen.

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