A new spin on an old trick is making online scammers richer, with a combination of AI Overviews on Google search pages and a lack of contact information on companies’ websites.
As reported in Yahoo! News, AI Overviews can prove to be a rich source of income for online con-artists, with bad actors posing as company representatives and extracting funds from unwary users who have the bad luck to contact them. In the quoted instance, Alex Rivlin, the owner of a real-estate business, contacted an individual posing as a customer service representative from cruise company Royal Caribbean, with a query about the company’s shuttle services to and from Venice.
Over the course of their phone conversation, Rivlin gave the bogus operator his credit card details to pay for gratuities associated with his holiday in return for the fake Royal Caribbean rep ‘waiving the cost’ of shuttle services. It was only a couple of days later, and after his credit card saw several extra transactions, that he realised he’d been duped. Fortunately, he was able to recoup the lost funds from his credit card company.
The making of the con
Scammers posing as representatives from large companies place messages on third-party online properties such as review sites, listing fake phone numbers. Search engines scrape such sites, and over time, the false details begin to build credibility, to the extent that they surface to the top of search results, and can become the first response given to users by AI Overviews.
While search engines like Google have long-established routines to filter out rogue claims of legitimacy, the AI Overviews feature now embedded at the top of many Google searches can become a new conduit for false information – and many users take the first suggestion they see from an AI as trustworthy. That was the basis of the con perpetrated on Alex Rivlin, who describes himself as relatively tech-literate.
In the Yahoo! piece, Rivlin recounts that he’d looked for contact details in the Royal Caribbean mobile app, but couldn’t find them, so reverted – as many users would – to using Google to unearth the necessary information. That highlights a common trend in consumer dealings with major brands, one that seems to discourage voice communications with the company by making person-based contact details difficult, if not impossible, to find. Consumers attempting to contact Google, Amazon or Microsoft, for example, can easily spend a fruitless few hours trying to find a real person who can address their concerns or answer questions.
Google AI Overviews present old con in new ways
Google told Yahoo! News that it can take some time to update its data indexes even after abusive content is removed at the source. According to industry insiders quoted in the article, Google has vetted information for many businesses and it should only refer to those sources when providing information.
However, given the ease with which it’s possible to build what algorithms see as ‘credibility,’ and the fast-changing nature of online business, there’s no static repository of information that can be regarded as canonical. And it’s here that scam artists can slip through the cracks.
The combination of the reluctance of many brands to give out direct-dial phone numbers, and the demand for instant-answers, makes victims more prone to falling foul of criminal schemes. Add in the tendency of users to believe 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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