- Interpol says GenAI-powered fraud is 4.5 times more profitable
- AI powers phishing, deepfakes and social engineering campaigns
- Agent AI Could Enable End-to-End Autonomous Fraud in the Future
Cybercriminals and fraudsters who use Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) are 4.5 times more profitable than those who do not use it, Interpol says.
In a new research paper, titled “Global Financial Fraud Threat Assessment,” the international law enforcement agency said AI “greatly increases the efficiency and effectiveness” of fraudulent campaigns, suggesting its popularity in the criminal sector will only grow.
There are numerous ways criminals can use GenAI, but the most obvious seems to be: polishing phishing content. Before the advent of AI, the best way to spot a phishing email was to simply correct it, as scammers were typically not native speakers and the messages were riddled with errors that made it obvious they were not coming from legitimate brands.
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With AI to polish and rephrase content, proofreading is no longer a viable option and phishing emails have become more successful and impactful.
But that’s just the “gateway drug” to AI-driven fraud. High-level criminals are using AI for deepfakes, creating highly convincing voice clones from almost no original material.
To make matters even worse, the dark web is full of widely available deepfake-as-a-service kits that further lower the barrier to entry and make starting a spoofing campaign just a matter of dollars.
“Over the past two years, technology has continued to enable and enhance financial fraud, allowing criminal networks to scale their operations exponentially with minimal investment,” Interpol said. “Digital technology and AI, in particular, have dramatically transformed social engineering and victim profiling techniques, allowing fraudsters to construct highly persuasive fraud environments.
Interpol also talked about agent AI: systems that “can autonomously plan and execute entire fraud campaigns, from reconnaissance to ransom demands.” For criminals it sounds promising, but it has not yet reached the level of mass use like GenAI. Whether that happens or not remains to be seen. After all, the promise of agent AI has yet to be fully realized in the legal world.
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