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Artificial intelligence makes scams easier to fall for and harder to detect. Here’s how to reduce the risk.
Just as we learned to ignore random dubious email requests from a self-described “Prince in a faraway land” seeking help recovering their lost fortune, those scams began to disappear. The same might soon happen to the latest generation of emails and text ruses, with its tell-tale conspicuous misspellings in the subject line, clashing fonts, and grammatical errors in the body of the message, which many people have learned are fraud attempts.
Online fraud is becoming more sophisticated by the minute, making it harder to distinguish legitimate offers or messages from people you trust from a potential scam. Scammers are embracing widely available Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and using them to get you to send money or share personal information for financial gain and/or identity theft.
“The scams aren’t necessarily different; they’re the same type of scams,” says Octavia Howell, vice-president and chief information security officer with Equifax Canada. But now fraudsters can instantaneously “scrape” social media and the web for information about an intended victim, create a profile of them, and craft a pitch likely to catch their attention and provoke a hasty response.
Say you’re a fan of a singer, scammers send you an email or text announcing a new “virtual tour,” urging you to click for a free pass. The old “spray and pray” tactic of blasting out countless messages in the hopes a few people bite is fading. AI now allows scammers to target individuals with tailored, highly convincing messaging that often looks polished and legitimate, and, as Howell says, “the likelihood of someone falling for the scam is greater.”
Many of the red flags we once relied on—like misspellings, odd email addresses or suspicious URLs—are often absent today. Today we are dealing with polished and sophisticated messaging which makes it more important than ever to spot the subtler clues:
The Canadian Anti-Scam Coalition, a group of 48 organizations that includes Equifax, urges Canadians to always “Stop. Check. Talk” before dealing with any suspicious messages. Never rush to respond, verify whether the request is legitimate, and if you conclude it isn’t, report the fraud attempt to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. The organization has a new website specifically to facilitate reporting of scams.
If you discover you’ve been impacted by a scam, it’s doubly important to report it. “The best thing you can do is report it so that the public can know about it,” Howell says. “If you don’t, then it will happen to others.”
For an extra layer of security against AI-enabled scams and other forms of fraud, consider subscribing to a protection service such as Equifax Complete Protection. This digital service, starting at $34.95 per month, monitors changes in your Equifax credit report, manages your passwords, protects devices, deploys a VPN for data encryption, helps restore your identity in case of identity theft and more.
“Equifax Complete Protection can help protect you and your family from fraud before it happens,” Howell says, “as well as protecting with monitoring and recovery if you are targeted.”
Equifax Complete Protection is a credit and cybersecurity protection service designed to help Canadians spot the signs of identity fraud faster.
Subscription price: $34.95 per month
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