Watch Out Scammers - AI is Coming For You!

Do you think that you're immune to scammers? I thought I was. But soon discovered just how naive I had been.

My experience all started one morning with a phone call. My husband answered and I could quickly see the distressed look on his face as he turned to me and said it was our son. He had been arrested. He then handed me the phone.

I took the phone and heard my son crying on the other end. He told me he had broken his nose as he had been in a car accident. He said he was driving when someone stopped quickly and he had rear ended them. The air bag didn't deploy and his face crashed into the steering wheel. Even though this was an accident, he had been taken into the police station as a witness told the police that he had been texting while driving.

He told us he was now going to be charged for reckless driving.

He swore to me that he wasn't texting and that they had it all wrong. He wasn't sure what to do but had remembered that one of his friend's father was a lawyer so he called him when he got to the police station. The lawyer was with him now and wanted to talk with us.

I then began speaking with this lawyer. He told me his name and I quickly searched him on google. He was legit. He said he was at the police station with my son and had spoken with the police on his behalf. He then said that given the backload of cases due to COVID and because this was my son's first offence, they were willing to drop the charges if he covered the cost of repairs to the other car and paid a fine. Once paid, they would provide us with a police report which could then processed through our insurance.

I asked which police station he was at as I would come in with the money. He told me that since the pandemic, the police were limiting people's access to the building and they wanted us to do a direct deposit to a specific police account. I asked if there was any paperwork he could send us. He told me that they were too backlogged to do this and if this was needed, my son would have to be held.

By this point, my husband and I were starting to get suspicious but weren't quite sure so we started taping the conversation. After we hung up, I thought I would just try calling my son's cell phone just to see if he would answer. Surprise, surprise - he did. I asked where he was and he said "at home of course - where else would I be?"

We were being scammed.

As we were right in the throws of this scam, we headed to our local police station. We had the scammers on the line (literally) and thought this would help the police to snag them. The police asked us if any money had changed hands. Given that none had, they told us because a crime had not been committed they couldn't do anything about it.

I also called the lawyer whose name had been used. I'm not sure if he thought I was trying to scam him or something but at any rate I felt that I had at least warned him that someone was out there impersonating him.

We then received a call from the "lawyer" asking about the status of the money. We dragged the conversation on with him a little further saying we needed more time to get it. He was now getting irritated and accused us of lying and said we weren't at the bank. He told us he knew this because he was parked outside our home and could see the cars in our driveway. He then told us the makes of the cars we had. We told him that he was the liar and that we had reported him to the police. He hung up.

This was all a bit unnerving but we realized he was pulling this information off google maps as one of the makes the of car he was referencing we no longer had. But still, the fact they knew where we lived creeped us out.

As I reflect back on this experience now, it's seems quite obvious this was a scam and I should have picked it up from the start. But what you have to realize is that when your emotions are running high, you seem to bypass many potential red flags. Plus these guys were good at what they did. The first man sounded just like my son - and initially convinced me of this. And the second man sounded extremely professional and spoke with such confidence it was hard not to believe him.

The reason that I'm sharing this story is twofold.

First, like it or not all of us are susceptible to scams. I had been convinced that I would know if I was ever being scammed but these con-artists are very good at what they do. They typically tap into emotional situations that concern your family or your finances or would put you at risk with the government or the law. They also know what buttons to push. They know how to pull information from you to then feed back into the story to make it more believable and sound credible. They also make sure that you feel there is an urgency to do something immediately so you don't have time to think.

Secondly, I recently saw an artificial intelligence (AI) technology solution that is specifically targeting these scammers and was amazed at it's brilliance. Too often we hear of how AI is bad for us, but this is an example of where it's actually doing some good.

British telecom Virgin Media O2 recently launched an AI chat-bot named 'Daisy'. Daisy is a "grandmotherly" figure designed to specifically fight off scammers. Her conversational style is very witty and she eagerly chats with the scammers. Daisy's primary intention is focused on extending and wasting the time of the scammers as the time she spends engaging with them, they can't actually call us which ties up scammers time and resources without achieving any results. This technology also provides valuable information to law enforcement about the scammers practices.

Here's a video on this amazing technology in action;

In my situation, we were very fortunate that we realized we were being scammed before actually handing over any money. But sadly, many people are not quite as lucky. But hopefully by educating ourselves of scammer practices plus the addition of more "Daisy's" out there helping to protect us, we can all be safer and keep the scammers away - and ideally put them completely out of business.