alphaPlan · Cybersecurity · Cheat-sheet 06
AI-Powered Scams
AI makes scams fluent, personal and convincing, so judge the request instead of the polish and confirm anything sensitive on a channel you chose.
Ideas to remember
- 01AI writes scam messages that are fluent, personalised and mass-produced, so bad grammar is no longer a tell.
- 02A face can be faked in real time on a video call, so a familiar face is a claim, not proof of identity.
- 03A few seconds of public audio is enough to clone a voice, which powers the panicked 'relative in trouble, send money now' call.
- 04A synthetic identity is a person who never existed, built from real and fake details that all point at each other.
- 05Every one of these scams needs you to accept a claim of identity without checking and to act fast, so one habit defeats them all.
- 06Urgency plus money equals verify: that pressure is the attack, not a detail of it.
Words
- Deepfake
- Video or audio that AI has generated or altered to show a real person saying or doing something they never did.
- Voice cloning
- An AI copy of someone's voice made from a short recording, able to say anything the attacker types.
- Synthetic identity
- A fabricated persona with a profile, activity and references that are all part of the same set of lies.
- Separate, trusted channel
- A route you chose and already trust, never the contact details supplied in the suspicious message.
- Safe word
- A word or phrase agreed in advance that only your family or team knows; a clone cannot guess it.
Do this
- Judge what a message asks and whether the request makes sense, not how well it is written.
- Before acting on a sensitive request made over video or phone, hang up and call back on a number you already have.
- Pick a family safe word today and make sure everyone who might be called knows it.
- Treat a new contact you cannot check independently as unproven: a profile is not proof of a person.
- Never use the contact details supplied in the suspicious message itself.
Watch out
- A well written, personalised message asking for something sensitive deserves more suspicion, not less.
- Betting on spotting a visual glitch, odd blinking or mismatched lips, is a weak plan because the technology keeps improving.
- Calling back the number that just rang you, or letting the caller 'prove' it on the same call.
Found something unclear, outdated or improvable? Suggest an improvement