Scammer Dupes Man Out Of $600,000 In 10 Minutes By Posing As Friend Using AI
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A man in China's Fujian province lost a whopping 4.3 million yuan (approximately $600,000) in 10 minutes to a scammer who harnessed the powers of Artificial Intelligence.
The incident reportedly occurred on April 20 when the victim, surnamed Guo, received a WeChat video call from someone he thought was his friend.
Using an AI program, the con artist mimicked the face and the voice of Guo's friend and asked for his company's bank information to bid on a certain project.
To convince Guo further, the fraudster claimed to have already transferred the money into Guo's account and sent a screenshot of a fake bank transfer receipt.
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"I received the video call. I verified the face and the voice. So I let my guard down," Guo said, as per Global Times.
After making two separate transfers to the account the scammer had provided, Guo messaged his friend using his actual contact information. As expected, that friend denied knowledge of the transactions.
Guo immediately alerted police, who then alerted the scammer's bank in another province against making the transfer.
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Authorities managed to halt the transfer of 3.37 million yuan (around $476,000). The remaining 931,600 yuan (approximately $131,000), which was successfully transferred to the fraudster's account, is now subject to retrieval efforts.
Police have previously warned the public against AI-powered schemes.
Earlier this month, a Chinese man was arrested for using ChatGPT to create fake news and profit off website clicks.
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"The person on the other side didn't ask me to lend him money during the chat," Guo recalled, as per China Daily. "He said that he would transfer the money first, and then what I needed to do was transfer his money to his company's account."
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China is reportedly working on relevant legislation against AI fraud.
In the meantime, authorities are urging the public to verify the opposite party's identity through multiple channels before making financial transactions.
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High School Students Use AI To Create A Friend For The LonelyABC10 Originals
High school students use A.I. To create a friend for the lonelyABC10 Originals
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People get lonely, and sometimes having someone to talk to can really help.
If people are in a senior assisted living facility or an isolated community, it can be hard to make friends. However, that may not be the case for long. Two high school inventors from Folsom have developed an app that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide lonely people with an instant friend.
For nearly 15 years, Beverly Johnson's mountain retirement home just outside Placerville has been her sanctuary. It's a place to make and reflect on memories and pictures of her husband.
"This picture is of my husband when we did an MS (multiple sclerosis) walk. My husband had MS," said Johnson.
After losing her husband to MS, Beverly's secluded home became lonely.
"A lot of times it does get lonely. There are only so many things you can do, and usually when you are doing something you like to do it with someone else," said Johnson.
In February, Johnson's home got a little less lonely after she met a new friend named Geri. Geri is a conversational AI cell phone app made for lonely people.
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"You know, I am kind of really having fun with this because she makes me laugh and even if it is a mistake, it makes me chuckle because I am talking to a computer," said Johnson.
The app was developed by Rishi Ambavanekar and Rohan Kulkarni, student inventors from Vista Del Lago High School in Folsom.
"We want to see people with Alzheimer's using this. We want to see people struggling with social situations because they are isolated using this," said Kulkarni.
Ambavanekar and Kulkarni are not your typical high schoolers, and Geri is not their first invention. Last year, Ambavanekar was featured on Good Morning America for inventing a device that helped stroke victims communicate. Kulkarni has a makeshift laboratory of inventions that fill his parents' upstairs office.
Solving world problems is what the two friends like to do for fun and developing Geri was no different. However, this invention also had a personal meaning behind it.
"It actually started with my late grandfather. He was in the hospital for leukemia," said Ambavanekar.
While in the hospital, Ambavanekar's grandfather had limited access to visitors. Loneliness set in.
"We noticed this was not specific to just him, but a lot of my grandparents and their friends experienced this as well," said Ambavanekar.
To solve the problem Ambavanekar and Kulkarni turned to the artificial intelligence program Chat GPT.
"Chat GPT is a very new general intelligence model, a big language model," said Ambavanekar.
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Chat GPT has highly advanced artificial intelligence capabilities that developers can use to help build different programs. Ambavanekar and Kulkarni used the Chat GPT to build Geri. A simple one-button user-friendly cell phone app for lonely people like Johnson to use.
"It's not at all like I thought the computer would be. I grew up with the show 'The Jetsons.' I don't know if you remember," said Johnson.
In the cartoon show the Jetsons, RUDI the talking computer was George Jetson's friend. RUDI was an Artificial Intelligence system that could make its own unique decisions like a human. Geri, on the other, hand cannot.
"Basically, it's trained on a bunch of data all over the Internet on a bunch of subjects, and it is meant to complete sentences," said Ambavanekar.
Essentially Geri is predicting what the user wants to talk about, but those predictions aren't always right — and that's where Johnson comes in.
"I think he is happy when you tell him what the problem is, and by the end of the day, he has fixed the problem," said Johnson.
Johnson is beta tester. Anytime there is a problem with Geri she texts back and forth with Ambavanekar and Kulkarni.
"Beverly has just been giving me great feedback. She always tells me improvements," said Ambavanekar.
Thanks to Johnson and about a dozen other beta testers, development of Geri is almost complete. The next step is to launch the app and get it in the hands of other lonely people. They want to offer it to them free of charge, but there's just one problem.
"Every single question you ask costs us between half-a-cent, and two cents," said Kulkarni.
Ambavanekar said with a hundred users, that cost could go up to $50 a day.
Because Geri runs off the Chat GPT program, there is a fee for using it. The high school kids are now looking for financial backing so Geri is accessible to every lonely person.
"She (Geri) asked me one day. Do you think AI will catch on? My answer was: 'It already has. I am talking to you,'" said Johnson.
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Your Girlfriend Might Not Be Real
Artificial intelligence, or AI, might be able to generate its own artwork, prose, and even music, but it also might be able to replace your romantic partners.
One influencer has found a way to use AI to become the girlfriend of over 1,000 people, using a voice-based chatbot that is a near-clone of herself.
Caryn Marjorie, a 23-year-old influencer with 1.8 million followers on Snapchat, charges her followers up to $1 per minute to interact with her digital self, CarynAI. Trained by thousands of hours of recordings of the real Marjorie, AI company Forever Voices' CarynAI is capable of mimicking her to a convincing degree, playing the role of virtual girlfriend to Marjorie's customers by chatting about future plans, sharing intimate feelings and sometimes even flirting sexually.
Stock image of a man in love with a robot. An AI-powered chatbot named CarynAI may be the first in a surge of AI girlfriends to many. ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUSAccording to Fortune, CarynAI initially launched on the Telegram app as a private, invite-only beta test, but is soon to be available to the masses. Newsweek has asked Forever Voices for comment by email.
So, why might AI partners be a future balm for lonely people across the world, reminiscent of the AI Samantha from the Spike Jonze film Her?
"Existing research on the motivations behind the use of chatbots or robots reveals that many of these motivations align with those for having relationships with humans. People often seek these technologies as companions or to have novel sexual and romantic experiences. It is important to note that contrary to popular belief, loneliness does not appear to be a major factor associated with the use of these products," Joris Van Ouytsel, an assistant professor of digital interpersonal communication at Arizona State University, told Newsweek.
"A few years ago, my colleague and I conducted an exploratory study where we let participants engage in sexually explicit conversations with a chatbot. It's worth noting that the chatbot used in our study was not as advanced as the current AI-driven chatbots. We divided the participants into two groups: one group was told that they were chatting with a human, while the other group was told they were chatting with a chatbot (both were in fact chatting with a chatbot)," he said.
Surprisingly, they found no significant difference between the two groups in terms of enjoyment, arousal, or emotional response.
"This implies that during sexting conversations, whether one is interacting with a chatbot or a person may not have a substantial impact on the overall experience," Van Ouytsel said. "However, participants did express frustration with the unrealistic and artificial nature of the chatbot's messages. This suggests that the quality of the messages, such as their pacing or tone, rather than the awareness of interacting with a robot, can significantly affect our experience when using these types of products. As the current chatbots are very realistic in nature, people may genuinely enjoy the conversations as much as with a human."
Stock image of a person talking to a chatbot online. ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUSThe reason that we are drawn to interacting with chatbots like this, even though we know they aren't a real person, is likely linked to our tendency to anthropomorphize, or project human qualities on non-human objects
"That's a real risk with some of the generative AI tools: they can easily prey on that tendency," Nir Eisikovits, a professor of philosophy and ethics at UMass Boston, told Newsweek. "If you combine that tendency of ours with technologies that sound and look human (say chatGPT and a deep-fake trained on hours of actual video, or chatGPT and an actual Ameca robot that has believable facial expressions) you are certainly looking at people developing attachments to non-human entities. We have been known to humanize cars, pets, storms—you name it. Just imagine how attached we can become to non-human objects that actually behave like humans."
If AI romance catches on, it could be a burgeoning market. CarynAI already generated $71,610 in its beta phase, and is hoped to make $5 million per month, assuming that 20,000 of her 1.8 million-strong fanbase become paying customers.
However, the adoption and reach of these technologies will be significantly influenced by the stigma attached to using virtual companions.
"Currently, there are social stigmas associated with forming relationships with AI," Van Ouytsel said. "However, if this stigma diminishes in the coming years, we can expect to see a broader adoption of these technologies. Similar to how online dating was once taboo but gradually became more accepted, we may witness a similar shift in attitudes toward AI in the near future. This shift could result in an expanding market and increased adoption by users."
Additionally, there are concerns that this form of AI partner isn't entirely ethical, and may cause those who use them to form unhealthy ideas of what a relationship really is.
"One of the more concerning elements is the commodification of relationships using AI tools. As the crisis of loneliness grows, corporations will continue to see this as a market to be filled with temporary solutions such as AI partners," Alec Stubbs, a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy and technology at UMass Boston, told Newsweek.
"Another way that this is disheartening is that it gives us a false sense of control over those that we are in relationships with. I worry that our relationships with AI partners reflect unhealthy relationships that are built on control and domination. One's AI partner can be programmed to attend to specific needs and not others. It can be programmed to only serve and never demand. But what it means to relate to others is to recognize the infinite demandingness of being a social creature—what we owe others matters as much as what is owed to us. Reciprocation is a cornerstone of human relationships," Stubbs said.
He continued: "An additional worry is that we come to view AI partners as replacements for rather than supplements to our relationships with humans and other sentient creatures. In doing so, we potentially risk viewing relationships with sentient creatures as one-way streets, that the purpose of a relationship is to fulfill my personal wants and desires. In truth, we relate to each other in complex ways, and our relationships require cooperation, commitment, the adjudication of competing desires, and the elevation of others' life projects."
Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about AI? Let us know via [email protected].
