If you’re anywhere close to my age (currently 73) you’re probably being bombarded with scam emails and scam advertisements on supposedly legitimate social network news sites like Google News. These scams are almost always targeted at older folks. And now the scammers are using AI to make their pitches more convincing.
I investigated one this morning, then looked it up to see if this particular scam (a cure for dementia based on honey) had any basis in fact. What I saw surprised me: Scammers are using AI to create deepfake videos to attract purchasers. Such scams are almost always based on a video. The video portions showing talking heads seemed off to me. And they are. Here’s the article that picks this particular scam apart. I noticed that speech and lip movements were always a little uncoordinated. That’s an AI deepfake tell. I was right about that.
The bad news, as always, is that there is no slam-dunk honey-based treatment for dementia. I knew that going in. What I wanted to gauge was how convincing the pitches were.
I got another one pushing a slam-dunk cure for cancer, one freely available in Europe but suppressed in the US by Big Pharma. As with all the others, it’s delivered in a video—a video with no progress bar and thus no way to cut to the chase. I remember leaving one such video running in a window while doing something unrelated. It ran for over half an hour, and included videos of supposed scientists and/or physicians saying basically the same things over and over again. At about 35 minutes I shut it down. The technique was the same as all the others I’d seen.
Here are some insights:
- Long videos filter out the skeptical (like me) and hook the naive and (even more so) the desperate.
- In the videos I’ve watched to their conclusions, at the end is a pitch for newsletters, books, and non-prescription supplements of dubious value.
- The videos reveal almost nothing factual about the products. I suspect there’s some sunk-cost psychology at work here; people who have been watching a video for half an hour are likely to see it through to the end simply because they’ve already wasted so much time on it.
- There’s a scare factor focused on Big Pharma: “Watch this video now before Big Pharma shuts it down!”
- If there were in fact a truly effective cancer-killer pill available in Europe, we’d know about it over here in the US. Ditto the honey-based dementia cure. The Web is international; I read European sites regularly, albeit largely on topics unrelated to health.
- AI video deepfakes make it possible to persuade the credulous that RFKjr and Dr. Sanjay Gupta are endorsing the products.
What surprises me is how such scams can go on and on with no legal action taken by authorities. Making deepfake videos of people without their permission is legally actionable and almost always evidence of fraud. If Big Pharma were interested in these scams at all, it could afford enough legal artillery to bury such scams ten miles deep.
And now AI is making them even more likely to rip off older people with no tech background. I’ve got no solution. I just wanted to point out that AI sometimes works precisely when and where it shouldn’t.
