The call comes out of the blue. On the other end of the line, your granddaughter’s voice — a voice you would recognize anywhere — is begging you for help. Please don’t call her parents, she pleads, or she will be in even more trouble. Just send money, and everything will be OK.
So, you send money and fearfully wait for an all-clear message, but it never comes because your granddaughter is blithely unaware of this situation and the need to assuage your panic. What you heard on the phone may have been her voice, but it wasn’t her.
The grandparent scam — a con meant to prey on older adults and exploit them for monetary gain — has been around for a while. In the typical scenario, people are caught off guard by an unexpected call and emotionally manipulated into thinking their grandchild has been in an accident, been arrested or had their car break down in an unsafe area and desperately needs help.
“It used to be they would disguise their voice,” says Martin Bailey, community ambassador for AARP and member of AARP Fraud Watch Network, demonstrating a garbled voice. “I sound like this because I’ve got a broken nose.”
Now, the scam has gotten a twist with a technological advance already causing concern in a variety of fields: artificial intelligence, commonly known as AI. Reports to law enforcement of AI being used in scams started about a year ago, with the grandparent scam targeting older adults occurring the most frequently, Bailey says.
Sound clips pulled from data breaches or any number of innocuous public sources are being cloned and put into a chatbot, which is a computer program designed to simulate conversations with human users, Bailey says. It involves more setup work on the scammer’s part, but this isn’t likely to be high school dropouts cold-calling people from their parents’ basements and hoping they hit pay dirt.
“Think of a call center with about 100 people lined up with written scripts in front of them — proven scripts that work — with phone numbers to call going over this over and over again. You no longer have just a scammer; you have a professional criminal,” Bailey says.
In 2022, almost 400 victims over age 60 reported grandparent scams, with approximate losses of $3.8 million, according to the FBI’s 2022 Elder Fraud Report. This is only a fraction of the $3.1 billion in total losses that 88,262 victims over 60 reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center last year.
While the grandparent scam is where reports show artificial intelligence is currently being used by criminals to hone their cons, Bailey says it has potential in many more ways and numbers are only expected to increase.
However, while the scams are getting more sophisticated, the protections remain the same, Bailey says. With the grandparent scam in particular, try to take a step back and think rationally. Give your grandchild a call to verify their identity. But even beyond this type of scam, know that anytime you are asked to address some urgent financial matter with a gift card, cryptocurrency or peer-to-peer payment app, it’s a scam.
Visit the AARP Fraud Watch Network at aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/helpline or call the AARP Fraud Watch Helpline at 877-908-3360.
