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The holiday season has traditionally been a bonanza for cyber criminals. It’s the time of the year when shoppers are searching for bargains online, making them particularly susceptible to “too good to be true” deals and other scams promising huge discounts. And now these cyber criminals have a new weapon in their arsenal: artificial intelligence.
This holiday season, cyber criminals are devising new ways to use popular AI tools such as ChatGPT in order to lure in and then entrap unsuspecting shoppers. Let’s take a closer look.
ChatGPT and the art of the holiday scam
First of all, understand that many of these cyber criminals pulling off these holiday scams are not located within the United States. Instead, they are located in far-flung destinations around the world. And that means one of their primary handicaps – at least, until now – has been their command of the English language. It’s hard to come up with a “fake Walmart offer” or a “fake Amazon offer” if you’re misspelling every other word, or if the language just somehow seems off.
But ChatGPT fixes all that. All you have to do is type in a simple text prompt, and ChatGPT does all the rest. It can deliver a flawlessly written email, free of spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. It can tailor specific messages for certain demographic groups. And it can make it possible to push out an alarming amount of fake content within a very short period of time.
In short, ChatGPT can be used to speed up the creation of fake promotions and fake offers. And it can be used to entice people to leave behind key data, such as credit card numbers or social security numbers. It means that phishing scams, in which an email message appears to come from a trusted source, can become much more elaborate. Moreover, the power of ChatGPT means that the same types of messages can be crafted for social media platforms, not just email. That Facebook page promising amazing discounts on popular holiday gifts might just be entirely fake.
How to outsmart AI
The good news is that it’s still possible to outsmart ChatGPT. According to cybercrime experts, there are several basic steps that just about anyone can take to avoid being scammed by AI.
First of all, you should always check the source of any email message that sounds too good to be true. And if you feel any uncertainty whatsoever about the sender of the message, you should avoid clicking any link found directly within the email. Instead, you should go directly to the website of the company offering the deal, discount, or promotion. And, finally, if you think that you are being victimized by an online fraudster, you should always contact the customer service department of the company.
Lessons from ChatGPT
That’s just the start. You should probably also familiarize yourself with the type of content that ChatGPT tends to produce, so that you can recognize a fake AI-generated message from the outset. For example, ChatGPT is very good at producing bland boilerplate content that it can find somewhere else on the internet, so a bland, uninspiring message might be a tip-off that the message is coming from an AI bot.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway is this: always be on your guard when shopping online. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
