The newest bank account scams are synthetic and AI-fakes

Online crooks have evolved far beyond phony phone calls, urgent texts, and emails asking for immediate help. They now use AI tools to impersonate people and bypass security measures to steal all the money in your checking and savings accounts.

Federal agencies say the problem is real. The Federal Trade Commission estimates Americans lost $3 billion to scams started online last year, plus another $1.9 billion to popular electronic communications such as texts and phone calls.

Here’s what you are facing and what you can do to protect yourself:

Synthetic identity fraud. It’s the fastest-growing form of financial crime in the United States, with estimated losses projected to hit $23 billion annually by 2030. Rather than steal your information, thieves invent identities by combining real and fabricated data, often a legitimate Social Security number belonging to a child or deceased person with a fake name, birth date, and address.​ Generative AI has made it easy for criminals to produce realistic synthetic identities, complete with convincing documents, quickly.​

Fraudsters then build legitimate-looking credit histories by initially borrowing and repaying a little money, and later making big-dollar transactions before disappearing with the money. Because an identity is not directly linked to one person, the fraud often goes undetected for years and rarely generates a consumer complaint.

How to avoid becoming a victim: Regularly monitor your credit reports and freeze credit for your children, elderly relatives or other people for whom you manage their finances. Watch for inquiries that use a name similar to or identical to the individual's. It is your first tip-off that something is wrong. Report to your financial institution suspicious activity, such as a series of failed attempts to answer security questions or bypass multifactor authentication, followed by a successful login and attempted withdrawal.

Deepfake-Enhanced Fraud. AI is also to blame for seemingly realistic videos, audio recordings, and images, often in real time. Since 2020, crooks have made off with over $50.5 billion using the technology.

Here’s how criminals operate. They:

• Use synthetic videos and audio to bypass facial recognition and “Is this really a live person?” detection measures.
• Impersonate account holders to convince customer service representatives to grant them access to someone else's funds.
• Convince grandparents that a loved one is facing a cash crisis and build trust through online romantic relationships before requesting financial gifts or loans.​

How to avoid becoming a victim:

• Be wary of a video or audio communication asking for money, especially an urgent request that severely limits your time to confirm what you are seeing or hearing is real. When a relative makes an unexpected financial request via digital communication, verify their identity through a separate communication channel or by asking questions only the real person would know.
• Look for subtle inconsistencies in a video, such as unnatural facial movements, audio that doesn't quite match lip movements, unusual blinking patterns, inconsistent lighting and faulty backgrounds. All are signs that a thief is producing a fake video.

Business Email Compromise (BEC). Consumers are now being targeted with grammatically perfect, contextually appropriate messages that replicate individual communication styles. They work better than phishing attempts because they exploit a person’s trust rather than attempt to defeat a network’s security measures.

Here's how: After researching your social media and public records, fraudsters impersonate a trusted contact, such as an employer, banker, or friend, to persuade you to transfer funds or reveal bank account credentials. Because the messages contain no malicious attachments or suspicious links, they slip past traditional security tools. Further, they may not ask you for money right away, building trust and credibility through regular, seemingly legitimate communications before making a request.​

How to avoid becoming a victim:

• Look closely at any email asking for money, even if you know the person through work, family, or friendship. Among the warning signs are slight variations in email address, which could be off by a few letters, or a new smartphone number.
• Be suspicious of behavior out of the ordinary, such as a relative or friend who has never asked for money or a boss who has never communicated in that tone of voice.
• Don’t trust; verify a financial request through a separate communication channel you know, not the one provided in the message.
• Say no to any request that seeks to bypass verification. You should already be using multi-factor authentication on all financial accounts, also known as 2FA, and never reuse passwords across different platforms. If an email creates pressure to act immediately without verification, that's your clearest warning sign to stop communicating and alert your financial institution.

To better protect yourself from scams, visit Tropical Financial’s ID theft and credit protection: