Warwickshire police runs workshops to tackle rise in AI scams
In total, according to its Fraudscape report, more than 374,000 fraud cases generally were reported to the Cifas National Fraud Database (NFD) last year
Warwickshire Police says older people will be more vulnerable to realistic scams.
It comes after a fraud prevention body revealed criminals are finding new ways to target consumers using social media and deepfake technology, with cost-of-living pressures also having an impact.
Cifas said that over the past year, members had reported being increasingly concerned about the potential growth in fraud generated by AI or artificial intelligence.
It is seeing an increase in AI-enabled identity fraud, such as sophisticated phishing scams, deepfake images, videos and audio.
Detective Inspector Chris Finch, from Warwickshire Police’s cyber team, says they’re running initiatives in the community to tackle the rise in AI scams.
He said: “As the technology advances, criminals are using this as an opportunity to scam people out of money. So as AI and deep fake technology improves, we expect to see fraudsters using this technology more for more realistic scams. It's going to take quite an effort between law enforcement, government and industry specialists to consider how we tackle this problem.
“So just as fraudsters will no doubt use the technology, we also need to use the technology to tackle it ourselves from our end. Social engineering is one of the main threats in fraud and cyber offending, as the victim is being convinced that they know the person they're interacting with. It is more difficult for them to detect because they can't tell when deep fake or artificial intelligence technology is being used.”
DI Finch explained: “Warwickshire police has got a team dedicated to providing advice to help protect the public from these scams. We run social media campaigns.
“It's really important that people help us in their efforts to educate their friends and family about the dangers of it, particularly people who are elderly, who perhaps aren't active online and don't see our social media campaigns. We need help to educate some of the people that might be more vulnerable to some of these scams.”