Warning issued over impending scam bot invasion

If your inbox is full of dubious group chats about crypto, you might think scams are already widespread.

But the levels we see are about to go ‘crazy’, as criminals increasingly turn to scam bots to do their work for them.

At a conference on cybercrime in Westminster today, industry professionals gathered to hear about how the world needs to ‘build an army of fraud fighters’ to take on the scammers, who are tooling up and often linked to global organised crime. 

Scam expert Jon Clay, who will be giving the keynote speech at the Global Anti-Scam Summit tomorrow, told Metro he was wary of spreading ‘FUD’ – ‘fear, uncertainly, and doubt’ – but felt in this case it is warranted because people need to be aware.

The VP in threat intelligence at Trend Micro said this army of scam bots will be here as early as 2026 or 2027, and warned people to create a ‘safe phrase’ as the best way to verify if they are really speaking to their loved ones.

The threat is not just from deepfakes, which can fool people with convincing video and audio. It’s a revolution in the whole way scammers do business, with things they used to manually outsource, like scouring data, now easily automated. 

Artificial intelligence will scout out victims and create personally targeted emails to fool people to part with their money, free of the spelling errors which currently plague scam messages.

The buzz word here is ‘agentic AI’, which means a type of artificial intelligence which can operate independently, without constant human instruction.

Once unleashed with a mission to defraud, these autonomous scam bots could work night and day to fool us and take our money.

Jon told Metro: ‘The agents will basically do everything. It will allow them to scale fraud to no end.

‘You can’t work 24 hours as a scammer: you have to eat and sleep. But if I have something doing it for me in the background, I can do what I want, even go to a movie and have something doing my scam for me. 

‘Why wouldn’t you invest in that?’

Tech savvy criminals will even sell the programmes they create to others, making it easy to to automate crime even for those who don’t know much about computing.

Jon told how ‘face swapping’ is an increasingly prevalent scam, where someone can appear in real-time video as somebody completely different, such as a man appearing as a woman with a female voice, reading from a script.

Fraud is already the most prevalent crime in the UK, making up around 41% of all crime reports, and costing an estimated £6.8bn each year in England and Wales alone. 

The summit heard how globally, over a trillion dollars was lost in scams last year  – over 1% of the world’s GDP  – with a quarter of the global population losing money.

Trend Micro is among the companies fighting AI with AI, using machine learning to spot red flags and advise users accordingly.  

They demonstrated their new ScamCheck app which can automatically block spam calls, allow people to check video calls for deep fakes in real time, and analyse screenshots of messages to see if they can be trusted.

Also exhibiting was Feedzai, software used to detect financial scams which is now already used by Mastercard and Amazon to flag suspicious transactions. 

In today’s keynote address, Sir David Hanson unveiled a new Fraud Strategy from the Home Office to ‘beef up’ the current approach.

The UK’s first dedicated minister for fraud said this would give more protections to businesses and the public, with new proposals including data sharing, improving online safety education and tackling the newest AI scam threats.

This must be an international approach, he stressed, as scams do not respect borders and can come from anywhere in the world, with little chance of those responsible being caught.

He said: ‘It’s not going to be something we can resolve, but I think we have a responsibility in all of our sectors to step up to the plate.’

Lord Hanson also announced next year’s Global Fraud Summit will take place in Vienna, jointly hosted by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and Interpol.

He pledged ‘significant funding’ for the summit in hopes to ‘secure a global public private agreement to effectively block fraud from reaching citizens.’

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