GenAI deepfakes are raiding older folks’ wallets

In February, when OpenAI launched Sora, its text-to-video generative AI model, I tweeted, “boomer Facebook groups are about to get hit with the craziest political deepfakes of all time.”

My post was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it highlighted one of the biggest risks associated with the explosion in generative AI technology: all things being equal, older people tend to be more susceptible to scams, and with generative AI improving rapidly, it was only a matter of time before we started hearing about GenAI financial scams. Earlier this week, The New York Times delivered:

Mr. Beauchamp, an 82-year-old retiree, saw a video late last year of Mr. Musk endorsing a radical investment opportunity that promised rapid returns. He contacted the company behind the pitch and opened an account for $248. Through a series of transactions over several weeks, Mr. Beauchamp drained his retirement account, ultimately investing more than $690,000.

Then the money vanished — lost to digital scammers on the forefront of a new criminal enterprise powered by artificial intelligence.

The scammers had edited a genuine interview with Mr. Musk, replacing his voice with a replica using A.I. tools. The A.I. was sophisticated enough that it could alter minute mouth movements to match the new script they had written for the digital fake. To a casual viewer, the manipulation might have been imperceptible.

“I mean, the picture of him — it was him,” Mr. Beauchamp said about the video he saw of Mr. Musk. “Now, whether it was A.I. making him say the things that he was saying, I really don’t know. But as far as the picture, if somebody had said, ‘Pick him out of a lineup,’ that’s him.”

Thousands of these A.I.-driven videos, known as deepfakes, have flooded the internet in recent months featuring phony versions of Mr. Musk deceiving scores of would-be investors. A.I.-powered deepfakes are expected to contribute to billions of dollars in fraud losses each year, according to estimates from Deloitte.

By combining generative AI platforms with cheap Meta ads, scammers can now spin up realistic deepfake videos in a matter of minutes and blast them out to the internet for a few dollars. Meanwhile, social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram have struggled to keep up with the speed at which these videos are hitting their sites and prevent or even flag them (for those curious, I followed a similar Instagram ad, impersonating Ray Dalio, down its rabbit hole in May).

While a video of Musk claiming to be able to double a given investment in a day probably seems preposterous to most of us, it only takes a couple of victims per millions of impressions to make the scam lucrative. Older folks already tend to be less technologically literate, and that, combined with cognitive decline, makes them extremely vulnerable to these scams. Unfortunately, I only expect these scams to grow more and more common with time.