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Scammers have long been raking in cash as people moved their financial lives online, but the risks are now cascading thanks to artificial intelligence.
From voice and video cloning to phishing, the technology has become so sophisticated that even wary consumers can be duped. In the U.S. alone, the consulting firm Deloitte projects that AI will help push fraud losses overall to $40 billion by 2027, up from $12.3 billion in 2023.
The best response, writes finance researcher Pawan Jain of the University of Michigan-Flint, is not to retreat into helplessness but to take action. He lays out a series of practical steps that can stymie scammers, with an especially careful eye on protecting people over 60, who are most at risk.
But there’s only so much one individual can do. Regulation that brings financial institutions into the fight, Jain argues, is what makes a difference – and this message is starting to resonate around the globe. For example, the U.K. now requires banks to reimburse most fraud victims, as these institutions have the tools to spot suspicious patterns across millions of transactions.
“What they had lacked was a strong financial reason to deploy them fully, and the reimbursement rule supplied it,” Jain writes.
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