Artificial intelligence has made scams so elaborate that it can be difficult to tell what's real and what's not. An unnamed Ferrari executive was recently targeted by a scammer who made a pretty convincing impersonation of company CEO Benedetto Vigna until he was outsmarted. The scammer contacted the Ferrari exec via WhatsApp posing as Vigna, though the phone number and the profile picture didn't match the ones that the CEO normally uses.
Something still sounded off to the executive so he asked the alleged Vigna a simple question: 'what book did you recently recommend that I read?' The scammer had no clue ? AI doesn't do that yet ? and hung up. If you're wondering, the correct answer was 'Decalogue of Complexity: Acting, Learning, and Adapting in the Incessant Becoming of the World,' which was written by Italian author Alberto Felice de Toni and published earlier in 2024.