COUNTY VIEW: Online scamming has grown up, and it’s pretty scary

There was a time when, every other week, most people’s email inbox would contain an unsolicited invitation to avail of an offer to become rich beyond dreams.
It was sometimes the widow of a far-flung potentate, seeking assistance to transfer her late husband’s illicit riches to a place of safety. Or it might be a high-ranking banker in a remote country who had come across an unclaimed fortune and who was prepared to share the deal with a trusted foreigner who could help shift the haul to London. Or it might be that your name had come up as a winner in a multimillion lottery for which, mysteriously, you had never bought a ticket.
The scams were so infantile and transparently bogus that it was hard to see anyone falling into the obvious trap. (Although it was said that, either through naivety or sheer desperation, some victims took the chance in the hope of solving their financial woes.)

Sophisticated scams
But that was back in the day of donkey-and-cart online trickery. Since then, the villainy of scamming has become much more sophisticated, with even the smartest and savviest being duped into parting with all they own on the promise of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
In the U.S., law enforcement officials estimate that one in every 100 Americans fall victim to a scam annually. Many are young, smart, educated and tech savvy; among them are police officers, FBI agents, financial advisers and psychologists.
Consumer-affairs expert Conor Pope recently told the story of the woman who lost €20,000 of her pension savings over four months and who, in hindsight, finds it hard to believe she was so foolish and so innocent.
The woman – given the alias, Stacey Nolan in the story – was duped into believing that Coldplay’s lead singer, Chris Martin, had befriended her after she clicked a ‘like’ on the band’s webpage. As the online ‘friendship’ grew and the grooming of the innocent woman continued, ‘Chris Martin’ began to request money – €500 for a donation to his charity supporting orphans, a further €20,000 loan for a film project. The bedazzled Stacey sent on the money, as directed, to his business manager in Minnesota. And then the conversations stopped. ‘Chris Martin’ disappeared, and so did all the money she had sent him.
Through all of this, any doubts she may have had were allayed when he had chatted with her via Skype, as various band members were to be seen walking around in the background. The audio was muffled, she said later, but ‘I could see that he was talking to me’.
What she didn’t know was that the footage was an AI-generated deepfake. This is a technique by which, even with only a 15-second clip of someone’s voice, AI can produce a clone that scammers use for impersonation. It might have been of cold comfort for the lady to learn that she was not the only dupe of such a scam. An employee in the Hong Kong office of Arup, the giant British engineering firm, was tricked into paying out £25 millon by a video call with deepfake impersonations of his senior colleagues, including the firm’s head of finance.
Or maybe her pain might have been assuaged by the story of Shan Hanes, ex-CEO of a bank in Kansas. Highly regarded in the banking world, Mr Hanes knew all about the risks of online fraud. A pastor in his local church, he was the last man to do anything reckless. He had made a lot of money trading crypto currencies – he had invested all his own savings, his church’s reserve funds, and $40 million ‘loaned’ from the bank he worked for.
His only problem was some difficulty in repatriating his money from where he had invested it in Asia. By the time he realised he was the victim of an elaborate scam, it was too late. The money was gone, so too was the crypto company he thought he was doing business with. The losses sustained by the bank, Heartland Tri State, were so great that it collapsed and, convicted of embezzlement, Mr Hanes is now serving a 24-year jail sentence.

Cybercrime soars
Cybercrime is now likely to overtake narcotics in terms of global criminality, according to law enforcement agencies. In addition, it is much more difficult to control, since cybercrime provides little hard evidence; it is, literally, money vanishing into thin air. In Cambodia and Laos, where scamming is practically a national industry, cybercrime now accounts for a massive chunk of the economy, with entire industrial sites turned into cyber-scam factories.
As we know only too well, cybercrime now includes hacking, ransomware attacks, and identity theft – a long way removed from those early, clownish attempts to snare the unwary. Our reliance on modern technology, with all its wonders, means that every device we use leaves us more open to the threat of being scammed, without our even being aware of how exposed we are.