"As technology advances, it can be increasingly difficult to detect fraud as documentation can easily be altered or falsified so its key to know what tell-tale signs to look out for."
In the first half of 2024, £570 million was stolen in payment fraud alone in the UK, which is the highest level of cases since 2020. This alarming statistic was called out in UK Finance’s mid-year fraud update for 2024, which also revealed that the total number of cases rose by 16% in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year.
As technology advances, it can be increasingly difficult to detect fraud as documentation can easily be altered or falsified so its key to know what tell-tale signs to look out for; checking if dates are consistent, for bank statements are the transactions in reverse chronological order and are the balance amounts transpositional?
You may have noticed the increased use of QR codes in recent years, allowing users the ability to scan codes with just a phone camera. Well fraudsters have seized the opportunity to get unknowing members of the public to scan fake codes. There are a few ways in which these can be fraudulent, if it’s displayed in a public place, could the QR code have been tampered with or is there a sticker over the original code? Or if you scan a code that takes you to a website, is it a secure site? One easy check you can make is to ensure that the link always starts with HTTPS and that there aren’t any obvious spelling errors.
The fraud landscape is continuously evolving, and one area in particular is deepfake scams, which first made an appearance in 2017. Deepfakes are types of synthetically generated or modified media used to impersonate someone or something and their use has increased by an alarming 550% between 2019 and 2023.
With the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), the ability to clone someone’s voice or image are already well documented with surprisingly realistic results.
A recent case that hit the headlines early this year, involved an employee at a multinational firm based in Hong Kong. Fraudsters used deepfake technology to create a video call featuring several deepfake recreations, so it looked like his colleagues were on the call and he was duped into transferring $25.6m.
Closer to home, OFCOM’s report on Deepfake Defences called out an advert supposedly fronted by Martin Lewis, consumer champion, which has been circulating and encouraging the public to invest into a fake scheme. New Generative AI (Gen AI) models mean fraudsters can create and manipulate image, video, and audio content with limited technical skill needed, often for free or via a subscription based service.
Now don’t get me wrong, there are lots of ways in which AI could be seen as a benefit and indeed data from Deloitte’s Digital Consumer Trends UK 2024 suggests that 18m people in the UK are using Gen AI, which is a 35% increase on the previous year. 7m people admit to using it for work purposes, claiming it benefits productivity with the top three uses being; idea generation, looking up information and creating written content.
However, we all need to remember that there is little advice and no regulation for the use of Gen AI in the workplace currently. Businesses are having to navigate the landscape themselves which could expose them to risk if they aren’t aware of the associated limitations and opportunities.
In order for Gen AI to work best, you could find yourself having to input sensitive data which then raises the question about security. Even if you aren’t feeding in your figures, there is a risk that the information it provides could be wrong and/or shared elsewhere without your knowledge.
No matter what side of the fence you are sitting, these tools look set to stay and currently its everyone for themselves when it comes to adopting it into work life, so my advice would be to tread very carefully!
