August 22, 2023 • 21 mins
By now we’re familiar with the many ways hackers and scammers try to fool us into handing over our personal data–and our money. But the thieves keep getting more sophisticated. And now they have a powerful new tool at their disposal: artificial intelligence, which can mimic websites, financial documents and even our faces and voices. In this episode, Bloomberg’s Nabila Ahmed and Adam Haigh talk about the new wave of financial fraud that’s taking shape–and how banks and governments are racing to keep up.
Read more: Deepfake Imposter Scams Are Driving a New Wave of Fraud
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
I got an email once a number of years ago
from somebody to say that they knew my password, and
I actually mentioned what my password was, which was quite
an old password. They said, I know this is your
password if you don't get in touch with me, and
pain that they would release videos ahead of me and
pictures that they'd taken from my webcam and I know
what you get up to in front of your webcam,
(00:22):
all that sort of you know, insinuations. But what worried
me initially was the fact that they had legitimate information
about me in some way. But I contacted the I
think I contacted the police actually and said to them,
you know, should I be worried about this? And they said, no,
we recognize that as a scam.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
We hear all the time about people being fooled by
online scammers. You fall for a fake email or click
on a link that looks legit but isn't. I've done it,
even though I like to think of myself as world
weary enough to tell the difference. But even as we
all become more hardened against any kind of request for
our information, the scam are coming up with more sophisticated
(01:02):
ways to steal our identities. And our money, and no surprise,
they're now getting a big helping hand from you guessed it,
artificial intelligence. The financial industry is a prime target and
banks are struggling to protect customers. Bloomberg's Nabila Ahmed and
Adam Haig in Sydney have been reporting on how AI
(01:25):
is transforming financial crime and what we can do to
stay one step ahead.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
They're running a business too, and they're going for maximum profit,
and unlike the banks, they're not bound by rules and regulations,
so they're able to move a lot faster. And that's
why the banks it seems like they're just a step
behind and trying to catch up.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
This is an arms race of technological innovation, really, and
if the scammers are one step ahead with a technology,
then they're going to continue to keep winning.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
I'm Wescasova today on the big take Artificial intelligence, Real Money, Adam.
In this story that you and Nobela rode with our
colleagues Ainsley Thompson and Ellie Harmsworth, you talk about how
(02:29):
artificial intelligence AI is changing the way people are falling
victim to scams, and you're talking your reporting about this
concept of social engineering scams. What exactly are those.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
I think this is just kind of like another element
of how AI is gripping this change that we're seeing
in scams and forgulent payments. So social engineering is kind
of just another way to phrase what's happening in the
way that they're getting access to people through the multitudes
of different ways that they can do that. So one
(03:02):
of those is coming at you directly through Facebook and
WhatsApp and those kind of places. But really the next
level is how AI is being used to essentially replicate
people who may be close to you in your lives,
so they can pretend to be someone that you know,
(03:23):
and they can use that as a way to kind
of play on your emotions and be able to get
access to your money and your funds. Your identity essentially
feels like it's no longer safe, especially once you've been
out there either talking or you know, everyone has a
voicemail message that can be used to get a realistic
(03:44):
interpretation of what your voice is. As the example with
the fake masks and how they're used with the three
D printing to create fake IDs, like it shows that
you've just got so much information out there on the
Internet through all sorts of social media platforms that we
all use and everyone uses on a day to day basis.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Nibela. We've had phishing scams for a long time where
someone will pretend to be someone you know or somebody
in your email phone book if you can starts emailing
you and you kind of know it's not them. How
are these different?
Speaker 3 (04:18):
The US Federal Trade Commission, which has been really trying
to look into this space and protect consumers, has been
saying that AI is being used to turbocharge fraud, and
that's what we're seeing here, is that artificial intelligence is
being used to clone people's voices to make it sound
like them. To really refine these attacks. In the case
(04:40):
of the ones where people are calling up, say I'm
calling you pretending to be your child, and I've actually
downloaded their voice from the internet, mostly from social media accounts.
A lot of people now have open public social media accounts,
so it's very easy to get snippets of people's voice.
They only need about twenty the thirty seconds, so it's
(05:01):
not very much, and they can put it through a
synthesizer that you can buy on the internet, or you
could even get free ones where it allows you to
clone that person's voice and gets it to say whatever
you want it to say.
Speaker 5 (05:14):
So we've had cases where.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Children ringing up their parents asking for money or saying,
you know, I'm stark, I'm a school excursion, the bus
is broken down. I really need money to pay for
an uber or pay for a taxi whatever, Please.
Speaker 5 (05:27):
Can I have that money?
Speaker 3 (05:29):
And in that moment, when you hear your child in distress,
it's very hard for the target of these scams to
decipher and to stop and think, pause and think is
this really my child?
Speaker 5 (05:42):
Are they really in trouble? What should I do here?
Speaker 2 (05:46):
How widespread a problem is this? How many people are
getting scammed using these new technologies.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
It's hard to tell how many are getting scammed using
the new technologies. We know that the number of people
getting scammed and that amount of money that people are
losing is just going up and up and up. For example,
in the US last year, consumers lost about eight point
eight billion dollars, which was up forty four percent from
the year before. Of those, the investment scams are some
(06:17):
of the fastest growing ones. But AI is being used
in all kinds of different scams, so it's really hard
to pass through exactly you know what percentage of scams
are using AI, But we just know that it's a
new tool that's available to fraudsters and they're using it
in more and more innovative ways.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
What are some of the most popular scams, like ways
of extracting money from people.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
So one really good example that we got from one
of the banks that we were talking to, they had
a customer who lost about seven hundred and fifty thousand
dollars through one.
Speaker 5 (06:51):
Of these investment scams.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
So this was a guy who had worked in finance,
who was coming towards the end of his career, and
he decided that he wanted to do some of his
own investments, and he took a lot of his money
and put them into a bond fund, you know, it's
meant to be safe, and it was pretty good yielding.
And he found this fund on the internet. So he
did a search engine search at Google Search and it
(07:15):
popped up with this particular investment company. Looked pretty legit,
and as he looked into it more and more. And
remember this is a guy who worked in finance himself,
so he's a little bit familiar with the language. So
he looked at the site they had regular prospectuses, they
had updates. They would send him quarterly updates talking about
how his investments were doing, and it was showing that
(07:37):
it was going really well. So he kept investing more
and more, and it was I think a year or
two later when he went to actually withdraw that money
and cash in on his profits that he realized that
it was all.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Fake and nobila. One of the ways where AI is
used for a financial fraud is to simply make investment
websites that look exactly like the real ones we use.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
That's exactly right. You know, we're all familiar with chat GPT.
If you type into that that you want to have
a prospectus written for somebody that works in the financial
industry and write it from the perspective of a financial
investment firm, it.
Speaker 5 (08:18):
Does a pretty good job. It actually does a pretty
scarily good job.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
So AI is being used to really refine the language
and refine the look and feel of these prospectuses and
financial updates so that investors find it difficult to figure
out what's real and what's fake.
Speaker 4 (08:36):
So what we're really seeing is that AI is being
used in many different areas of scams across the spectrum
which includes all sorts from romance scams to voice scams
where they take your voice and pretend to be someone else.
ID based scams where they're taking another form of ID
(08:57):
such as your face and pretending to be you.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
And you talked about how much this is costing consumers.
What about the financial institutions that are also getting scammed
when all these accounts are being hacked.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
More broadly, when you look at cybercrime costs, which includes scams,
they're set to hit eight trillion dollars this year, which
if it were a country, it would be the third
largest economy in the world today. By twenty twenty five,
the projections are that it will reach ten and a
half trillion dollars, which would mean that they would have
(09:34):
tripled in a decade. So there are some staggering numbers here.
And Microsoft put together some numbers for this story that
we're working on, and I'm just going to reel some
of them off here because they're just so incredible. Twenty
two billion is the number of records dolen by hackers
in twenty twenty two. Twelve one hundred and eighty seven
(09:55):
is a number of password attacks per second in the world,
just in about that. One thy two hundred and eighty
seven fifty six is the average number of days between
the time a scammer infiltrates your system and that infiltration
is detected. Seven to two is the minutes the median
(10:16):
time for an attacker to access your private data if
you fall victim to a phishing email. Five hundred thousand
is the number of new mailware variants that are being
created every day, and three point four million is a
global shortage of skilled security workers. So you can see
(10:36):
that there's an uphill battle here for sure.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
After the break, who's responsible if you fall victim to
a scammer?
Speaker 6 (10:53):
I was out on holiday in abi's Abi and I
got a notification on my phone that my car had
been used to try and book some flights with South
African Airways. Obviously, I thought that was a little bit
unusual given that I was on holiday, So they must
have taken a picture or someone who must have seen
my card details and then tried to plug it in online,
because when I called up my credit card company, it
(11:13):
was American Express. They were really good and they managed
to cancelorf and I wasn't charged or anything like that.
They were also tried to make a booking through booking
dot com or Trevago or something like that. They were
trying to get a hotel as well, and they didn't
manage to get through on that one. It was great
that I had this you know that feature on your
phone where it says when you purchased something. I immediately
called them and they sort it out straight away, Adam.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
So now we know that a lot of people are
getting scammed and a lot of money is being the last.
So who pays for it when somebody loses a bunch
of money, who's on the hook?
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Well, who exactly pays and who's responsible varies a lot
from country to country, but obviously no one wants to
take all of the hit hit. So basically what you
have is a situation where there's lots of discussions and
disagreement around where the responsibility lies. So it isn't a
clear cut thing. Obviously, if you've been victim of a
(12:08):
if you know someone's stolen your credit card, they've copied it,
the bank's pretty much going to give your money back.
In that kind of situation, where it becomes a bit
tricky is when you get tricked into making a payment
and that's where the responsibility is a little bit less clear.
So obviously, in a lot of scams, you are almost
by definition being tricked. So the difficulty then lies around
(12:33):
how the bank determines what's happened during the process. And
in places like the US and the UK, the onus
is moving on to banks taking more responsibility to reimburse
customers that have lost money through scams. But what we're
seeing is a big change in this area and a
lot of political capital now being spent on trying to
(12:55):
hold a bigger group of organizations responsible, so not just banks,
but also in some of these AI scams that are
involving tech platforms, for example, there's an argument now that
tech firms should have to stump up more for losses
in this area as well.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
If you ask the banks, they'll tell you who's not paying,
and that's big Tech. And banks around the world are
very vexed about this because they want big Tech to
be held more responsible for some of these scams that
are being hosted on their sites. So Adam mentioned the
investment scams, but also fake websites for online shopping for example,
(13:36):
that are popping up, and telecom companies or others that
banks think should be doing more to help block numbers
that are sending those phishing techs for example, or those
messages that they send where they say you forgot to
pay your toll, please click this link. They want telecom
companies to disable those kinds of links and tackle the
(13:58):
problem at its route.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
When are consumers on the hook to pay?
Speaker 3 (14:06):
I mean, that's the big question, because consumers themselves. So far,
you know, we've been used to credit card. For example,
somebody steals a credit card, they use that to buy
I don't know, one thousand bubblegum machines or something somewhere,
and you know it wasn't you, and the bank says, okay,
you can have your money back because we know that
was fortunant. So credit card fraud is unauthorized fraud because
(14:30):
you haven't allowed that to happen. But right now, what
we're seeing globally is that authorized fraud is actually surpassing
unauthorized fraud. So that's where somebody has tricked you into
giving up your money voluntarily. And in that instance, you know,
so far, banks are still paying out to a large degree,
but at some point, I guess you know, they would
(14:51):
really like consumers to take more responsibility. But it's very,
very difficult because you know, we've been saying how AI
is making it so much harder to discern what is
real and what is fake.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Is it realistic to say that the tech companies should
police this? Do they have the tools to do this?
And they're simply not doing it?
Speaker 4 (15:13):
Ultimately, this is about whether these firms want to spend
more money, more time weeding out what's real and what
isn't on their platforms, And of course they can do it.
There's varying degrees of how difficult that is to do it,
but it requires more time and more resources and more staff,
so ultimately it costs more money. So it comes down
(15:33):
to a simple equation on cost. Ultimately, if they want
to spend more of their dollars on getting a grip
on this, then that's one choice. The other choice is
not to spend as much time and money on this,
and that's another choice.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
When we come back, what can we do to protect ourselves? Adam.
One thing you write about is that is the banks
try to keep up with the scammers. The scammers are
trying to stay one step ahead and change the way
(16:11):
they do things.
Speaker 4 (16:12):
Yeah, there's a constant arms race going on here between
just a kind of keeping a competitive edge. So as
every kind of new technology evolves, of course you're trying
to catch up and you're trying to kind of prevent
the next thing from happening. But you're always catching up.
You're always trying to kind of stay one step ahead
of the game. But of course they're typically a step
(16:35):
or two behind the game, and the scammers are the
ones that a step ahead. So it's a constant effort
to try and to learn more, to understand what's going
on with the latest technology, and then to try and
have a plan to fight back against it. But it's
very clear from all the reporting that there's this sense
of skepticism and this sense that this isn't something that's winnable.
(16:58):
This is an arms race of technological innovation, really, and
if the scammers are one step ahead with a technology,
then they're going to continue to keep winning.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
So there were four of us reporting on this story
around the world, and we all heard from our sources
that it's just like Adam says, it's an arms race
and it's hard to win, but also that they all
have to now start pulling their resources a lot more
banks and tech companies they all have to ban together
(17:34):
because they just can't be as nimble as these scammers.
You know, you shut down a scammer call center and
another one pops.
Speaker 5 (17:40):
Up the next week.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
They're like big businesses, right, So a lot of these
people we spoke to said, look, they're running a business too,
and they're going for maximum profit, and unlike the banks,
they're not bound by rules and regulations, so they're able
to move a lot faster. And that's why the banks
it's seems like they're just a step behind and trying
to catch up.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
We touched a little bit on what governments are trying
to do to get their arms around this. Adam, what
kind of government regulation is in the works.
Speaker 4 (18:15):
Well, I think really what you need to see from
governments is more of a coordinated action around how they're
trying to tackle this. But of course, governments can only
step in if the private sector is doing their utmost
in a coordinated way to try and tackle this problem.
And I think that's kind of what you're seeing now,
(18:37):
is that governments are trying to get the private sector
to talk to each other. They recognize that this spans
across different parts of the economy. It's not just banks,
or it's not just technology firms. It's a whole swathe
of different companies that need to share information about how
to tackle this together with governments if they're going to
really tackle this and crack down on it.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
I can imagine a lot of people listening to this
podcast saying to themselves, oh, great, So if no one
seems to know how to stop this, how am I
supposed to protect myself from scammers? When the technology is
getting so good.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
I think we all can be a lot more vigilant
and just tidier about how we handle ourselves on the internet.
Just make sure that before you authorize any kind of
payment to anybody that you don't know that is not
an immediate family member that's already in your log of
accounts that you do send money to, just stop and
(19:34):
check for a sec It's very very easy to fall
victim to one of these scams. It's very very easy
to click that phishing email. In fact, I did it
last week because I thought it was a work email,
and as I went to click it, I thought, hang
on a second, so I like shut down the site
before it loaded, but I did click on it. You know,
(19:55):
it's just really easy to fall victim, so we all
just have to be so hyper vigilant.
Speaker 5 (20:00):
That's the best way to do it.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
And set up as many of those kinds of checks
and balances for yourself as you can. You know, maybe
only transfer money to accounct are already vetted and that
you already have in your address book for example. You know,
be careful when you're dealing with crypto exchanges and sending
money over crypto.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Nobila Adam, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 5 (20:26):
Thanks Wez, It's been really great.
Speaker 4 (20:27):
Thanks has been great to be with you.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take.
It's a daily podcast from Bloemberg and iHeartRadio. For more
shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen. And we'd love to hear from you.
Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg
dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is
Vicky Ergolina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. Frederica Romanello
(20:55):
is our producer. Our associate producer is Zenobsidiki Rafael is
our engineer with additional production support. From Jill Nematzi. Our
original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm West Kasova.
We'll be back tomorrow with another big take.
I got an email once a number of years ago
from somebody to say that they knew my password, and
I actually mentioned what my password was, which was quite
an old password. They said, I know this is your
password if you don't get in touch with me, and
pain that they would release videos ahead of me and
pictures that they'd taken from my webcam and I know
what you get up to in front of your webcam,
(00:22):
all that sort of you know, insinuations. But what worried
me initially was the fact that they had legitimate information
about me in some way. But I contacted the I
think I contacted the police actually and said to them,
you know, should I be worried about this? And they said, no,
we recognize that as a scam.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
We hear all the time about people being fooled by
online scammers. You fall for a fake email or click
on a link that looks legit but isn't. I've done it,
even though I like to think of myself as world
weary enough to tell the difference. But even as we
all become more hardened against any kind of request for
our information, the scam are coming up with more sophisticated
(01:02):
ways to steal our identities. And our money, and no surprise,
they're now getting a big helping hand from you guessed it,
artificial intelligence. The financial industry is a prime target and
banks are struggling to protect customers. Bloomberg's Nabila Ahmed and
Adam Haig in Sydney have been reporting on how AI
(01:25):
is transforming financial crime and what we can do to
stay one step ahead.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
They're running a business too, and they're going for maximum profit,
and unlike the banks, they're not bound by rules and regulations,
so they're able to move a lot faster. And that's
why the banks it seems like they're just a step
behind and trying to catch up.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
This is an arms race of technological innovation, really, and
if the scammers are one step ahead with a technology,
then they're going to continue to keep winning.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
I'm Wescasova today on the big take Artificial intelligence, Real Money, Adam.
In this story that you and Nobela rode with our
colleagues Ainsley Thompson and Ellie Harmsworth, you talk about how
(02:29):
artificial intelligence AI is changing the way people are falling
victim to scams, and you're talking your reporting about this
concept of social engineering scams. What exactly are those.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
I think this is just kind of like another element
of how AI is gripping this change that we're seeing
in scams and forgulent payments. So social engineering is kind
of just another way to phrase what's happening in the
way that they're getting access to people through the multitudes
of different ways that they can do that. So one
(03:02):
of those is coming at you directly through Facebook and
WhatsApp and those kind of places. But really the next
level is how AI is being used to essentially replicate
people who may be close to you in your lives,
so they can pretend to be someone that you know,
(03:23):
and they can use that as a way to kind
of play on your emotions and be able to get
access to your money and your funds. Your identity essentially
feels like it's no longer safe, especially once you've been
out there either talking or you know, everyone has a
voicemail message that can be used to get a realistic
(03:44):
interpretation of what your voice is. As the example with
the fake masks and how they're used with the three
D printing to create fake IDs, like it shows that
you've just got so much information out there on the
Internet through all sorts of social media platforms that we
all use and everyone uses on a day to day basis.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Nibela. We've had phishing scams for a long time where
someone will pretend to be someone you know or somebody
in your email phone book if you can starts emailing
you and you kind of know it's not them. How
are these different?
Speaker 3 (04:18):
The US Federal Trade Commission, which has been really trying
to look into this space and protect consumers, has been
saying that AI is being used to turbocharge fraud, and
that's what we're seeing here, is that artificial intelligence is
being used to clone people's voices to make it sound
like them. To really refine these attacks. In the case
(04:40):
of the ones where people are calling up, say I'm
calling you pretending to be your child, and I've actually
downloaded their voice from the internet, mostly from social media accounts.
A lot of people now have open public social media accounts,
so it's very easy to get snippets of people's voice.
They only need about twenty the thirty seconds, so it's
(05:01):
not very much, and they can put it through a
synthesizer that you can buy on the internet, or you
could even get free ones where it allows you to
clone that person's voice and gets it to say whatever
you want it to say.
Speaker 5 (05:14):
So we've had cases where.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Children ringing up their parents asking for money or saying,
you know, I'm stark, I'm a school excursion, the bus
is broken down. I really need money to pay for
an uber or pay for a taxi whatever, Please.
Speaker 5 (05:27):
Can I have that money?
Speaker 3 (05:29):
And in that moment, when you hear your child in distress,
it's very hard for the target of these scams to
decipher and to stop and think, pause and think is
this really my child?
Speaker 5 (05:42):
Are they really in trouble? What should I do here?
Speaker 2 (05:46):
How widespread a problem is this? How many people are
getting scammed using these new technologies.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
It's hard to tell how many are getting scammed using
the new technologies. We know that the number of people
getting scammed and that amount of money that people are
losing is just going up and up and up. For example,
in the US last year, consumers lost about eight point
eight billion dollars, which was up forty four percent from
the year before. Of those, the investment scams are some
(06:17):
of the fastest growing ones. But AI is being used
in all kinds of different scams, so it's really hard
to pass through exactly you know what percentage of scams
are using AI, But we just know that it's a
new tool that's available to fraudsters and they're using it
in more and more innovative ways.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
What are some of the most popular scams, like ways
of extracting money from people.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
So one really good example that we got from one
of the banks that we were talking to, they had
a customer who lost about seven hundred and fifty thousand
dollars through one.
Speaker 5 (06:51):
Of these investment scams.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
So this was a guy who had worked in finance,
who was coming towards the end of his career, and
he decided that he wanted to do some of his
own investments, and he took a lot of his money
and put them into a bond fund, you know, it's
meant to be safe, and it was pretty good yielding.
And he found this fund on the internet. So he
did a search engine search at Google Search and it
(07:15):
popped up with this particular investment company. Looked pretty legit,
and as he looked into it more and more. And
remember this is a guy who worked in finance himself,
so he's a little bit familiar with the language. So
he looked at the site they had regular prospectuses, they
had updates. They would send him quarterly updates talking about
how his investments were doing, and it was showing that
(07:37):
it was going really well. So he kept investing more
and more, and it was I think a year or
two later when he went to actually withdraw that money
and cash in on his profits that he realized that
it was all.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Fake and nobila. One of the ways where AI is
used for a financial fraud is to simply make investment
websites that look exactly like the real ones we use.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
That's exactly right. You know, we're all familiar with chat GPT.
If you type into that that you want to have
a prospectus written for somebody that works in the financial
industry and write it from the perspective of a financial
investment firm, it.
Speaker 5 (08:18):
Does a pretty good job. It actually does a pretty
scarily good job.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
So AI is being used to really refine the language
and refine the look and feel of these prospectuses and
financial updates so that investors find it difficult to figure
out what's real and what's fake.
Speaker 4 (08:36):
So what we're really seeing is that AI is being
used in many different areas of scams across the spectrum
which includes all sorts from romance scams to voice scams
where they take your voice and pretend to be someone else.
ID based scams where they're taking another form of ID
(08:57):
such as your face and pretending to be you.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
And you talked about how much this is costing consumers.
What about the financial institutions that are also getting scammed
when all these accounts are being hacked.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
More broadly, when you look at cybercrime costs, which includes scams,
they're set to hit eight trillion dollars this year, which
if it were a country, it would be the third
largest economy in the world today. By twenty twenty five,
the projections are that it will reach ten and a
half trillion dollars, which would mean that they would have
(09:34):
tripled in a decade. So there are some staggering numbers here.
And Microsoft put together some numbers for this story that
we're working on, and I'm just going to reel some
of them off here because they're just so incredible. Twenty
two billion is the number of records dolen by hackers
in twenty twenty two. Twelve one hundred and eighty seven
(09:55):
is a number of password attacks per second in the world,
just in about that. One thy two hundred and eighty
seven fifty six is the average number of days between
the time a scammer infiltrates your system and that infiltration
is detected. Seven to two is the minutes the median
(10:16):
time for an attacker to access your private data if
you fall victim to a phishing email. Five hundred thousand
is the number of new mailware variants that are being
created every day, and three point four million is a
global shortage of skilled security workers. So you can see
(10:36):
that there's an uphill battle here for sure.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
After the break, who's responsible if you fall victim to
a scammer?
Speaker 6 (10:53):
I was out on holiday in abi's Abi and I
got a notification on my phone that my car had
been used to try and book some flights with South
African Airways. Obviously, I thought that was a little bit
unusual given that I was on holiday, So they must
have taken a picture or someone who must have seen
my card details and then tried to plug it in online,
because when I called up my credit card company, it
(11:13):
was American Express. They were really good and they managed
to cancelorf and I wasn't charged or anything like that.
They were also tried to make a booking through booking
dot com or Trevago or something like that. They were
trying to get a hotel as well, and they didn't
manage to get through on that one. It was great
that I had this you know that feature on your
phone where it says when you purchased something. I immediately
called them and they sort it out straight away, Adam.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
So now we know that a lot of people are
getting scammed and a lot of money is being the last.
So who pays for it when somebody loses a bunch
of money, who's on the hook?
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Well, who exactly pays and who's responsible varies a lot
from country to country, but obviously no one wants to
take all of the hit hit. So basically what you
have is a situation where there's lots of discussions and
disagreement around where the responsibility lies. So it isn't a
clear cut thing. Obviously, if you've been victim of a
(12:08):
if you know someone's stolen your credit card, they've copied it,
the bank's pretty much going to give your money back.
In that kind of situation, where it becomes a bit
tricky is when you get tricked into making a payment
and that's where the responsibility is a little bit less clear.
So obviously, in a lot of scams, you are almost
by definition being tricked. So the difficulty then lies around
(12:33):
how the bank determines what's happened during the process. And
in places like the US and the UK, the onus
is moving on to banks taking more responsibility to reimburse
customers that have lost money through scams. But what we're
seeing is a big change in this area and a
lot of political capital now being spent on trying to
(12:55):
hold a bigger group of organizations responsible, so not just banks,
but also in some of these AI scams that are
involving tech platforms, for example, there's an argument now that
tech firms should have to stump up more for losses
in this area as well.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
If you ask the banks, they'll tell you who's not paying,
and that's big Tech. And banks around the world are
very vexed about this because they want big Tech to
be held more responsible for some of these scams that
are being hosted on their sites. So Adam mentioned the
investment scams, but also fake websites for online shopping for example,
(13:36):
that are popping up, and telecom companies or others that
banks think should be doing more to help block numbers
that are sending those phishing techs for example, or those
messages that they send where they say you forgot to
pay your toll, please click this link. They want telecom
companies to disable those kinds of links and tackle the
(13:58):
problem at its route.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
When are consumers on the hook to pay?
Speaker 3 (14:06):
I mean, that's the big question, because consumers themselves. So far,
you know, we've been used to credit card. For example,
somebody steals a credit card, they use that to buy
I don't know, one thousand bubblegum machines or something somewhere,
and you know it wasn't you, and the bank says, okay,
you can have your money back because we know that
was fortunant. So credit card fraud is unauthorized fraud because
(14:30):
you haven't allowed that to happen. But right now, what
we're seeing globally is that authorized fraud is actually surpassing
unauthorized fraud. So that's where somebody has tricked you into
giving up your money voluntarily. And in that instance, you know,
so far, banks are still paying out to a large degree,
but at some point, I guess you know, they would
(14:51):
really like consumers to take more responsibility. But it's very,
very difficult because you know, we've been saying how AI
is making it so much harder to discern what is
real and what is fake.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Is it realistic to say that the tech companies should
police this? Do they have the tools to do this?
And they're simply not doing it?
Speaker 4 (15:13):
Ultimately, this is about whether these firms want to spend
more money, more time weeding out what's real and what
isn't on their platforms, And of course they can do it.
There's varying degrees of how difficult that is to do it,
but it requires more time and more resources and more staff,
so ultimately it costs more money. So it comes down
(15:33):
to a simple equation on cost. Ultimately, if they want
to spend more of their dollars on getting a grip
on this, then that's one choice. The other choice is
not to spend as much time and money on this,
and that's another choice.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
When we come back, what can we do to protect ourselves? Adam.
One thing you write about is that is the banks
try to keep up with the scammers. The scammers are
trying to stay one step ahead and change the way
(16:11):
they do things.
Speaker 4 (16:12):
Yeah, there's a constant arms race going on here between
just a kind of keeping a competitive edge. So as
every kind of new technology evolves, of course you're trying
to catch up and you're trying to kind of prevent
the next thing from happening. But you're always catching up.
You're always trying to kind of stay one step ahead
of the game. But of course they're typically a step
(16:35):
or two behind the game, and the scammers are the
ones that a step ahead. So it's a constant effort
to try and to learn more, to understand what's going
on with the latest technology, and then to try and
have a plan to fight back against it. But it's
very clear from all the reporting that there's this sense
of skepticism and this sense that this isn't something that's winnable.
(16:58):
This is an arms race of technological innovation, really, and
if the scammers are one step ahead with a technology,
then they're going to continue to keep winning.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
So there were four of us reporting on this story
around the world, and we all heard from our sources
that it's just like Adam says, it's an arms race
and it's hard to win, but also that they all
have to now start pulling their resources a lot more
banks and tech companies they all have to ban together
(17:34):
because they just can't be as nimble as these scammers.
You know, you shut down a scammer call center and
another one pops.
Speaker 5 (17:40):
Up the next week.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
They're like big businesses, right, So a lot of these
people we spoke to said, look, they're running a business too,
and they're going for maximum profit, and unlike the banks,
they're not bound by rules and regulations, so they're able
to move a lot faster. And that's why the banks
it's seems like they're just a step behind and trying
to catch up.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
We touched a little bit on what governments are trying
to do to get their arms around this. Adam, what
kind of government regulation is in the works.
Speaker 4 (18:15):
Well, I think really what you need to see from
governments is more of a coordinated action around how they're
trying to tackle this. But of course, governments can only
step in if the private sector is doing their utmost
in a coordinated way to try and tackle this problem.
And I think that's kind of what you're seeing now,
(18:37):
is that governments are trying to get the private sector
to talk to each other. They recognize that this spans
across different parts of the economy. It's not just banks,
or it's not just technology firms. It's a whole swathe
of different companies that need to share information about how
to tackle this together with governments if they're going to
really tackle this and crack down on it.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
I can imagine a lot of people listening to this
podcast saying to themselves, oh, great, So if no one
seems to know how to stop this, how am I
supposed to protect myself from scammers? When the technology is
getting so good.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
I think we all can be a lot more vigilant
and just tidier about how we handle ourselves on the internet.
Just make sure that before you authorize any kind of
payment to anybody that you don't know that is not
an immediate family member that's already in your log of
accounts that you do send money to, just stop and
(19:34):
check for a sec It's very very easy to fall
victim to one of these scams. It's very very easy
to click that phishing email. In fact, I did it
last week because I thought it was a work email,
and as I went to click it, I thought, hang
on a second, so I like shut down the site
before it loaded, but I did click on it. You know,
(19:55):
it's just really easy to fall victim, so we all
just have to be so hyper vigilant.
Speaker 5 (20:00):
That's the best way to do it.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
And set up as many of those kinds of checks
and balances for yourself as you can. You know, maybe
only transfer money to accounct are already vetted and that
you already have in your address book for example. You know,
be careful when you're dealing with crypto exchanges and sending
money over crypto.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Nobila Adam, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 5 (20:26):
Thanks Wez, It's been really great.
Speaker 4 (20:27):
Thanks has been great to be with you.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take.
It's a daily podcast from Bloemberg and iHeartRadio. For more
shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen. And we'd love to hear from you.
Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg
dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is
Vicky Ergolina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. Frederica Romanello
(20:55):
is our producer. Our associate producer is Zenobsidiki Rafael is
our engineer with additional production support. From Jill Nematzi. Our
original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm West Kasova.
We'll be back tomorrow with another big take.
Hosts And Creators
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