Artificial intelligence offers new tools to crooks and allows them to extract sometimes extravagant sums, as today in China.
The rapid emergence of artificial intelligence and its tools has as much amazed, when it came to ChatGPT or Bard, as it worries. To the point that several voices were raised to ask for it to be put on hold. This new case that took place in China should further fuel anxious minds.
The crook with the perfect face
AI is a tool, and as such it is neutral. Thus, it can serve as much for the improvement of human living conditions as for the worst intentions. We have already had illustrations in previous months of this probability with scams based on the possibilities of cloning the voice of human beings, and this, in order to extract sums of money from several victims over the telephone.
But a milestone seems to have passed with this new scam that has just taken place in northern China, in Inner Mongolia. Indeed, thanks to the capabilities of AI related to the face swap, an offender was able to make a video call to his victim by taking the face of a friend and obtain from the latter a tidy sum of 4.3 million yuan (about 560,000 euros). This sum was presented as the deposit required for a tender procedure.
The concern grows
The crook played his trick perfectly, since the victim saw nothing but fire. She was only informed of the trap when her real friend told her to ignore this call. For their part, the police explained that they had succeeded in recovering a good part of the sum of money and would be taking steps to recover the rest.
However, this proactivity was not enough to reassure the Chinese public. The #AIscam hashtag thus exploded at the beginning of the week on the Weibo social network, where it reached 120 million occurrences. Users were particularly concerned about the ability of the law to keep pace with technological innovations, while China has nevertheless begun to produce rules to regulate the development of artificial intelligence.
Source : Reuters
9