A new spin on an old trick is making online scammers richer, with a mixture of AI Overviews on Google search pages and an absence of contact information on corporations’ web sites.
As reported in Yahoo! News, AI Overviews can prove to be a wealthy source of income for online con-artists, with bad actors posing as company representatives and extracting funds from unwary users who’ve the bad luck to contact them. In the quoted instance, Alex Rivlin, the owner of a real-estate business, contacted a person posing as a customer support representative from cruise company Royal Caribbean, with a question concerning the company’s shuttle services to and from Venice.
Over the course of their phone conversation, Rivlin gave the bogus operator his bank card details to pay for gratuities associated together with his holiday in return for the fake Royal Caribbean rep ‘waiving the price’ of shuttle services. It was only a pair of days later, and after his bank card saw several extra transactions, that he realised he’d been duped. Fortunately, he was capable of recoup the lost funds from his bank card company.
The making of the con
Scammers posing as representatives from large corporations place messages on third-party online properties equivalent to review sites, listing fake phone numbers. Search engines scrape such sites, and over time, the false details begin to construct credibility, to the extent that they surface to the highest of search results, and may turn out to be the primary response given to users by AI Overviews.
While search engines like google like Google have long-established routines to filter out rogue claims of legitimacy, the AI Overviews feature now embedded at the highest of many Google searches can turn out to be a new conduit for false information – and plenty of users take the primary suggestion they see from an AI as trustworthy. That was the idea of the con perpetrated on Alex Rivlin, who describes himself as relatively tech-literate.
In the Yahoo! piece, Rivlin recounts that he’d searched for contact details within the Royal Caribbean mobile app, but couldn’t find them, so reverted – as many users would – to using Google to unearth the mandatory information. That highlights a standard trend in consumer dealings with major brands, one which seems to discourage voice communications with the corporate by making person-based contact details difficult, if not unimaginable, to search out. Consumers attempting to contact Google, Amazon or Microsoft, for instance, can easily spend a fruitless few hours trying to search out an actual one who can address their concerns or answer questions.
Google AI Overviews present old con in new ways
Google told Yahoo! News that it may possibly take a while to update its data indexes even after abusive content is removed on the source. According to industry insiders quoted within the article, Google has vetted information for a lot of businesses and it should only check with those sources when providing information.
However, given the convenience with which it’s possible to construct what algorithms see as ‘credibility,’ and the fast-changing nature of online business, there’s no static repository of information that might be thought to be canonical. And it’s here that scam artists can slip through the cracks.
The combination of the reluctance of many brands to present out direct-dial phone numbers, and the demand for instant-answers, makes victims more susceptible to falling foul of criminal schemes. Add within the tendency of users to imagine that AIs’ responses are trustworthy (a belief the AI vendors do little to discourage), and decades-old scamming methods gain a new lease of life.
(Image source: “Sleight Of Hand” by JD Hancock is licensed under CC BY 2.0.)
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