"The very technology that empowers us may also imperil us," one said.There is growing fraud online in which scammers manufacture other identities to dupe financial institutions or their customers out of money -- and the crimes are only expected to grow more frequentA new survey of 500 fraud and risk professionals, first reviewed by ABC News, shows widespread concern in the financial industryand whether security and identity detection technology at banks and loan servicers can keep up.
Criminals using AI -- which can help perform rapid, automated tasks, among other functions -- can scrape the internet at record speed and, once armed with information from a combination of stolen, fake and legitimate digital data sources, can masquerade as other people, Jacoby said. That advisory noted that synthetic fraud is more complicated to address than traditional identity theft, in which a criminal steals a real person's name and other personal data in order to commit financial fraud. In synthetic fraud cases, by contrast, a criminal combines real data, such as Social Security numbers, with manufactured identities in order to elude credit monitoring and other security services.
The Michigan attorney general's office earlier this year likewise advised consumers that AI "allows scammers to easily create and personalize scams to make them more convincing," including the use of "personal information pulled from social media profiles and other online sources to tailor the scam to you."