Don’t lose your heart to a deepfake
A few weeks ago Sehrish Alikhan over at Finextra published an excellent article encouraging us to dump our fraudster over the Valentine period.
With the long weekend approaching grab a coffee and take a couple of minutes to read Sehrish’s article – here’s some key outtakes:
Loneliness makes anyone vulnerable to romance scams and online dating opens up more opportunities for fraudsters to scout targets.
Kate Frankish, Pay.UK
The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau reported losses of £92.3 million from October 2022 to 2023 due to romance fraud, and that they had received 8,036 reports of romance-related scams.
Coercive control is at the very centre of [romance scams], and whatever story the fraudster concocts, including the ones pretending to be celebrities using deepfake technology, it will suddenly end with them urgently needing money.
Bala Kumar, CPO of Jumio
In 2023, a man was found guilty of scamming Americans through romance, using a cryptocurrency exchange to cover the movement of Bitcoin funds to co-conspirators in Nigeria. The criminals defrauded victims of over $2.3 million dollars in criminal proceeds and earned hundreds of thousands in fees.
The honeytrap attack technique is among the most common, which involves a criminal befriending the victim by creating a fake profile and artificial persona. Now, with new AI tools on the dark web, such as ‘FraudGPT’, scams are becoming easier to create and even harder to detect.
Bala Kumar, CPO of Jumio
A report by Lloyds Bank found that romance scams rose by 22% in 2023, with an average of £6,937 stolen, which was less than that in 2022 (£8,237). In 2022, the largest losses in romance fraud was via cryptocurrency or bank transfers, but many reported that they paid their scammer using gift cards.
Other emerging tactics include the rise of deepfakes. Deepfakes are the new wingman to romance scammers — helping fraudsters generate artificial videos or images that closely resemble real people, using faces generated by AI or real human faces. With AI voice cloning, fraudsters can generate convincing voice calls that correlate with the fake profiles they’ve created, making it even easier to fool their victims.
Bala Kumar, CPO of Jumio
The age group that is more often a victim of romance scams are men and women aged between 55 and 64, with those between 65 and 74 losing the most money at an average of £13,123.
As the scams have become more successful and the fraudsters have refined their techniques, we’re seeing a similar evolution to what we’ve seen with ransomware and other types of cybercrime in the past: the creation of an as-a-service model.
Sean Gallagher, Sophos
Males are significantly more likely (73%) to be victims of romance scams than women (27%). Lloyds informed that in 2023, men made up 52% of romance fraud cases, however on average women reported higher losses of funds compared to men.
The scammers favourite lies:
With the long weekend approaching grab a coffee and take a couple of minutes to read Sehrish Alikhan’s excellent article encouraging us to dump our fraudster over the Valentine period.