This Scam Is Impossible to Detect

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]You look down at your phone and you see a familiar caller ID. It's your boss.

[00:00:05]You answer. He tells you he has an urgent task. Maybe he's lost his login ID for the company systems and needs to use yours or he needs to make a large bank transfer to a new account. The voice sounds exactly like him because it is.

[00:00:22]>> This is a bigger issue than just a few misleading videos. An army of AI scammers now needs just a few seconds to use your own social media content against you.

[00:00:32]>> You do exactly what he tells you. And the next time you see him in person, you ask him how it went. He looks at you confused. The person who called you was not your boss. It was a scammer using one of the many new and terrifying tools that are being used to defraud real people such as yourself every single day. It's already happening right now and I'll show you.

[00:00:57]>> It's real.

[00:00:58]>> It's not real.

[00:00:58]>> It's got to be real.

[00:00:59]>> It has to be real.

[00:01:00]>> It has to be real. Jamie fell for an AI generated video of Minnesota. I fell for it, too.

[00:01:06]>> You're probably wondering how I got rich with crypto. The truth is, I didn't get rich off crypto. I don't even exist.

[00:01:14]>> Are we at a place where when we turn on a screen, we will not be sure if we can believe our eyes.

[00:01:20]>> The answer is increasingly yes. still images. People can't tell anymore. Not reliably. Uh voices, people talking like you and I right now without video.

[00:01:28]People are can't tell reliably if what they're listening to is a real voice or not. And video is a fast follow.

[00:01:34]>> And then you left.

[00:01:35]>> Yeah. Why? So that I could talk freely at a conference. What did you want to talk about freely? How dangerous AI could be.

[00:01:45]>> For as long as there has been commerce, the trading of goods and services between us, there has been scams.

[00:01:51]They've just leveled up over time with human ingenuity and eventual technology.

[00:01:56]Give people a new tool and one of the first things they're going to do with that tool is figure out how to enrich themselves at the expense of others. And now we're heading into a time where scams do not have to look like scams anymore, which is a scary prospect. To make this video easier to understand, I'm going to break down scams into two main categories. Stupid scams and smart scams. You've heard of the classic, right? the Nigerian prince. But historically speaking, this scam goes back much further to 1904 at a minimum when it was referred to as the Spanish prisoner scam. Conmen would tell people that a wealthy individual had been imprisoned in Spain and if you help to pay for his release, you'll get paid handsomely. 80 years later, Nigerian princes were sending letters and faxes to people telling them a slightly different story with the same mechanisms to exploit greed. As a society, we consider this scam to be stupid because it seems outlandish and silly on the face of it. Many of you will question how anybody could fall for something like this. But the fact is that stupid scams sound stupid on purpose. They are designed for you to feel that way. To put this in simple terms, scams have always been a numbers game. Efficiency is the number one thing that matters.

[00:03:09]People who make a living from these stupid scams only want you to bite on the bait if you are unlikely to waste their time by being smart enough to see through it. So maybe you wouldn't fall for one of those historically. But what about smart scams? These are the exact opposite and these target individuals, people like yourself who see the other scams and dismiss them. To use a parallel and a direct upgrade of the Nigerian prince scam, let's use the business email compromise or BEC for short as an example. This scam, according to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, pays considerably more than the stupid Nigerian prince scam.

[00:03:45]Because these are sophisticated and targeted, a BEC scammer develops a complex understanding of their target.

[00:03:51]They pick competent, busy professionals.

[00:03:54]They research who works at the company, who handles payments, who has authority, how the company email formatting works, and the more time they spend on each target, the higher the chance of success becomes. The end goal is to understand the company well enough to social engineer access to accounts that allow them to trick people into sending or diverting payments. Or if they can't get official access to somebody's account, they use spoofed emails instead. They might pretend to be the CEO telling you that they are super busy with meetings and need you to handle this account payout immediately. They might even already be aware of upcoming payments or transfers and simply ask you to change the account details of those that have been preapproved. This is just one example of what we consider to be a smart scam. And they work on the most sophisticated companies on the planet.

[00:04:44]You just never hear about it because they don't report when it happens. This is the reality. Everything I've just talked about was already successful at the highest levels of business, but that's already outdated. The present- day possibilities are much scarier.

[00:05:00]>> Just last month, a finance worker in Hong Kong got scammed into paying a whopping $25 million to scammers.

[00:05:10]>> In 2024, an employee of a UK- based engineering company called ARUP loaded up his emails and saw something that looked sketchy. The chief financial officer of the company was asking him to make a quote secret transaction. He thought this was stupid and tried to dismiss the idea as being some kind of scam, but he was then invited to a video conference. He logged in and saw that the conference was full of employees he knew, voices and faces that all matched his experience working at the company.

[00:05:41]These were real people. He recognized them. So, at this point, who wouldn't believe the request for a secret transaction from a conference full of your colleagues and superiors? Are you going to turn down your boss when the evidence is in front of your eyes? He then initiated the transfer of $25 million split across five bank accounts in Hong Kong. Nobody noticed this was happening. In fact, it wasn't until the employee contacted a higher up and asked about the situation, which the higherup had no idea about. The entire video conference was a deep fate.

[00:06:15]Statistically, the average human in a controlled environment struggles to distinguish AI from reality in the current day. In fact, they struggle so much that they are only a few percentage points higher in accuracy than if they were to just guess instead. And it's not just that AI is more convincing than ever. These tools that are being used are now widely accessible and cheaper than ever. Meaning that what would have been costly and difficult, what happened to Aram 2 years ago, is now easier and cheaper today. repeat for each day that these technologies advance and proliferate. The concern here is that this cannot be stopped. This is inevitable >> where this latest AI boom is taking us. And I I don't think anybody knows honestly. But here's what I can tell you.

[00:07:03]>> If you look at the personal computer revolution, that took roughly 50 years to unfold, which at the time felt really fast. Then you look at the internet revolution, that was 25 years. M >> the mobile revolution was less than 10 years and the AI revolution has been well the AI revolution of course started in 1950 but the one we are experiencing now was about 2 to 3 years we have gone from 0 to 100 miles an hour where we are now talking about existential threats of AI we're talking about 50% of jobs being eliminated in the next 5 years we are talking about general artificial intelligence we're talking about the Terminator and we would not have had this conversation 5 years ago and by the way on top of all of that we are don't even know what's real anymore because we consume all of our content from online sources. Online sources have been polluted for a while. They're getting more polluted thanks to AI and suddenly our whole notion of reality is up in the air and that is it's unsettling. I think people feel unanchored and I don't >> I don't know how to help everybody with that.

[00:08:01]>> A human has to rely on what their eyes see and what their ears hear. But when fiction looks indistinguishable from reality, what can you do? As humans, we trust faces. We trust voices. We trust familiarity. What happens when you can't trust any of those? And what about when you apply this to just regular everyday people? In 2024, a private citizen of California received a phone call from his son telling him he was involved in an accident. He was going to go to jail and his lawyer would contact him soon to help pay the money for bail. The lawyer informed the concerned father that bail was set at $9,200, but after the money was handed over that it was then raised by an additional $15,800, totaling $25,000. It was only then that the lawyer stopped answering the phone.

[00:08:47]The phone call from the man's son originally wasn't real. It was a cloned voice. And you might ask, well, how could they get this random man's voice?

[00:08:57]There are many possibilities, but let's just look at social media. If you've ever posted a video of you speaking, you've given somebody the tools to scam your family, your friends, your co-workers. What about companies who sell our data? A concern for many years, but now you have to worry that the company who records your telephone calls for training and monitoring purposes doesn't then sell your voice or misplace it in one of the thousands of yearly corporate hacks that occur. It could really be as simple as picking up a call and responding normally. A prank call, a rooc call. Somebody could be recording you and then using that to spoof your voice. This legitimately might sound like tinfoil hack conspiracy theorist nonsense to play on the ever popular and growing AI fear to tell you that the sky is falling and soon everything will be fake. They will be able to manipulate people, right? And these will be very good at convincing people because they'll have learned from all the novels that were ever written, all the books by Machaveli, all the political connivances. They'll know all that stuff. They'll know how to do it.

[00:10:03]>> You don't have to look far to see that this is happening today. You don't need to be rich, famous, or important to become a tool in the everanging landscape of cyber crime. You don't even have to know that you're involved or that it's going on around you. I'll give you another example. Follow me to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. In 2025, the United States Department of Justice released a press statement titled, "Nationwide actions to combat North Korean remote workers elicit revenue generation schemes." To translate this for you, North Korean citizens, instructed by the government, would use fake or stolen identities to gain employment as remote workers from US businesses all the way up to Fortune 500 companies. deep faking interview footage with cloned audio and video documents created based on real people that exist and have no idea it's happening. They are not just using your identity to defraud people. They're using it for infiltration and espionage. From 2025 to 2026, that number is said to have risen by 220% yearonear with cyber security firms reporting more than 320 companies infiltrated and thousands of fake employees growing day by day. A funny side note is that some tech firms have begun asking candidates to insult Kim Jong-un, resulting in hilariously awkward clips such as this one.

[00:11:22]>> Okay. Uh I just Yeah, the joke is I think >> I just >> Okay, no worries. Um yeah, I mean I was I was in the process of saying like we get like a lot of imposter candidates, you know, uh particularly North Koreans like posing as like people that they're not. So, one of the tests that we do is trying to get them to say something like Kim Jun is a fat ugly pig. Could you could you say that for me?

[00:11:48]>> Uh, >> sorry. No, Kim Junan, you know, the leader of North Korea.

[00:11:58]>> Yeah. Uh, I So, I just say I should say like that.

[00:12:08]>> Yeah. Yeah, if you could because because it's it's one test so that I know that you're not not North Korean.

[00:12:19]>> Yeah.

[00:12:21]>> Can you say it?

[00:12:24]>> Damn. He uh really don't want to say it.

[00:12:28]>> North Koreans will not risk insulting the glorious leader. Doing so would likely result in severe punishment such as the death penalty. It's easy to laugh and think, "Wow, AI has gotten really silly." When you see the videos of Harry Potter going to the school of Balenciaga, or see the Facebook and Twitter boomers taking videos seriously that are clearly fake, such as the classic comic bookesque super villain freaking out in a courtroom after the judge announces their sentence. But when you look at what the technology was 3 years ago and compare it to today and then apply that to what people can possibly do with this in the world of fraud, the results are already terrifying and it's only going to get worse from here. There are of course endless examples I could use in this videos because scams never go away. They exist solely by exploiting human psychology and emotion. The Nigerian Prince scam or any investment scheme exploits greed. The business scams exploit authority bias using fear and urgency. But a scam that has already seen a massive statistical uptick with the loneliness epidemic is what is referred to as a romance scam. One of the most effective frauds in the world.

[00:13:40]Not because it's complex, but because it's completely emotional. These scams have always been limited by access to women who will participate with the scammer to send pictures, videos, or be around to video chat at a moment's notice. or of course the scammer themselves being the attractive female that lures you in. They exist to convince lonely men that they're real, they're interested, and they could potentially be a life partner. With deep fakes in real-time video and voice, this limitation no longer exists. In 2023, romance scams accounted for over a billion dollars in reported losses. And as I made clear earlier, the percentage of people who self-report being the victim of a scam is already incredibly low because they're embarrassed. But unlike other scams, this one doesn't just take money, they take life. And when reality itself becomes indistinguishable from what someone wants you to believe.

[00:14:31]>> I would say within the next 12 months, full-blown video is going to be over, right? It's it's over. But now, we are developing technology where you can navigate to a website, upload an image, and create a video of Vladimir Putin saying anything you want him to say. And that's why we think that this technology is particularly intriguing and also worrisome because now almost anybody can create fake media with the power of artificial intelligence.

[00:14:57]>> There really is nothing left to trust.