NEW YORK CITY – As if the public wasn’t plagued by enough scams aimed at separating them from their hard-earned dollars, an expert is noting that artificial intelligence (AI) is now being used to perpetrate complex, widespread fraud schemes upon the public that could bilk them out of as much as $1 trillion annually.
Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ government division, said that online criminals throughout the world are using AI-generated images of individual’s faces to steal taxpayer dollars from federal agencies such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Unemployment.
“Being one of the wealthiest countries in the world makes us a huge target,” Talcove said. “The amount of money that we’re going to lose over the next 12 months, if we do nothing, is going to make the COVID pandemic look like child’s play.”
Talcove noted that AI is presenting a degree of risk to federal security and programs designed to help society’s most vulnerable that has never been seen before, and that anyone with even an inkling of an online presence is a potential victim.
“AI, particularly generative AI, poses the greatest risk to the security of our most vital government agencies and entitlement programs that we’ve ever faced,” he said. “The technology is already so good that if any of your information is out on the web or social media can be used to create a generative AI model and blow past most of the government’s antiquated authentication systems.”
Anything that anyone has ever presented of themselves online can be used against them, Talcove said; this is especially true of social media, where AI-powered fraudsters can grab pictures, voice recordings, personal information, and random posts to use to attempt to perpetrate a scam.
“Simply put, if your information is out on the web, if it’s publicly available, it’s easily stolen by this technology,” Talcove said. “I suspect over the next 12 months, if the government doesn’t react to this quickly, we’re going to lose over $1 trillion to these criminal groups, some of which are located outside the country.”
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