AI: Cybersecurity experts warn of threats

Cyber security experts say scammers are using AI to steal money from vulnerable Americans. They're also tricking people to send money by impersonating family members, celebrities, and political figures. Ty Brennan has the story. More than 22,000 complaints of AI related cyber crimes last year, costing victims an estimated $893 million. Cyber security experts say criminals are turning to artificial intelligence to make their messages sound even more convincing. If I take my cell phone right now and send 1,000 text messages, scam text messages, I'm going to be shut down pretty quickly. A lot of these shady messages come from facilities known as SIM farms, where scammers keep hundreds of cell phones to route massive amounts of calls and texts. Since 2024, Homeland Security investigations have raided 68 of these SIM farms and recovered more than 500,000 SIM cards. Those are the small chips that connect your phone to a cell network. It used to be that you could kind of tell that something was a fake email or a phishing email or a fake text by the way it was written. Well, the problem now is a lot of companies use AI to develop their marketing. Well, guess what? The scammers use that exact same AI, so the messages become indistinguishable. Some of the most common scams right now involve messages threatening people with fake arrest They have these kind of setups where they can have just multiple phones and phone numbers and cycle through them and use them to send these messages. So no one number sending too many messages. One report from McAfee's, a cyber protection company, shows how just three to four seconds of audio is enough for AI to create a voice clone with 85% accuracy. Ty Brennan, Fox 10 News.