How AI scaled up shopping scams this year

Last spring, a well-meaning mom shared a Facebook ad with our parenting group — Chico’s was going out of business and every piece of clothing was $9.90! It's that they've put a super jet-powered engine behind some of the old tricks, and now there's just so much more of this out there, and it's so much more polished,” said Identity Theft Resource Center’s president and CEO, Eva Velasquez. It's that they've put a super jet-powered engine behind some of the old tricks" “They may even be able to reference recent browser purchasing history, because of there's so much information about us out there from breaches, from what we're putting out there on social media, what we're sharing, what we're liking,” she said, adding that what would have taken lots of time, energy and money to create even two years ago can now be done quickly and cheaply with current AI tools. Protective software is fast, scammers are faster A spokesperson from Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said they detected 1.1 billion fake accounts via AI before the accounts were reported. “They can't get any information back from the platform, and they can't wrestle control away from the scammers.” Scott Shackleford, a professor at Indiana University Kelley School of Business and executive director of the Center for Applied Cyber Security Research, said, “It's gotten easier than ever before to create those types of phishing websites … and you can also use those same tools to scan for vulnerabilities."