Channel 7 Morning Show | Scam accounts, and cyber-criminals

Segment courtesy of the Channel 7 Morning Show.

Scammers are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to trick their victims. Recently, Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, wrote to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, urging him to do more to combat a scam accounts impersonating her and other celebs.

Now, according to the National Anti-scam Centre, Australians lost a record $3 billion to cyber criminals last year, an 80% increase from the year before. So how can fraudsters be stopped and how can we protect ourselves from falling for it?

For more, we welcome back digital specialist and author Dr. Joanne Orlando. Nice to see you. Gina flagged more than 750 scams on the platform, including fake voice videos and investment offers. These are incredibly sophisticated. We talk to you every other month, and it seems like each time they’re getting more and more sophisticated in a short space of time, they are.

So this is how it works. So, you know, I is a scammers dream come true. So this is how it works. Say it’s Kylie that they want to use for this scam They’d take a bit of her audio voice so about 60s and they can use the notes in that to recreate it as if she’s talking about this scam. So whatever, you know, like investment, investment, whatever script they’ve got and they take the audio and then they take a bit of video footage of her and that’s a bit more tricky. But they do it and they manipulate the face and the mouth so that it matches the audio. Pop it together, put it up on normally on social media, any social media platform. But we know that Facebook is completely rife with it. And normally they hack into someone’s Facebook page. So it might be an author, a celebrity chef. It could be anyone else that you trust. So they’ve got this trusted celebrity on this trusted Facebook page. And then it’s convincing people to such an extent that we’re losing so much money.

People like Koshy are prone to that. Too much audio and vision of him around. Plus, that’s his space. Yes, I know he’s been targeted like that.

No, that’s right