We can no longer trust our emails. We can no longer take social media lightly. We can no longer buy without fear of losing our wallet. You can’t even sell your old used car anymore without risking being run over. It’s official: the Internet is a huge fraud.
It’s spring. For many people, it’s time to do a big clean and prepare for a possible garage sale. Because we are in 2024, most of this is done online, on Kijiji or on the Facebook Marketplace. You can sell anything on these platforms, including your car.
Except that the scammers are on the lookout. Even your old girl interests them. How ? It’s simple: they want to buy it. Quickly. In cash. At the price you ask. On one condition: can you send us a complete evaluation report, preferably obtained from the site we recommend?
These sites have reassuring names like “vehicleaudit”, or “vehiclehistory”. They offer to do the same thing as the official Carfax Canada sites, and more. That’s why the buyer insists: he doesn’t want a Carfax report. He wants the other.
Either way, it costs the same: around fifty dollars. So, you pay the site, you contact the potential buyer again to send them the report and… poof! He disappeared.
It’s only $50 for you, but for these swindlers, on the lot of used vehicles put up for sale on the Internet by individuals all over North America, it’s a nice nest egg that accumulates in their pockets.
We want your good (and we will have it)
It’s the kind of fraud that adds to all the others: email phishing, identity theft on seemingly banking sites, fraudulent phone calls. Where do you think scammers collect phone numbers and all the information about their victims? On the Internet !
There have always been attempts at fraud on the Internet. The first fraudulent email was identified in the United States in 1978. At the time, the Internet was called Arpanet and was used only by military personnel and academics. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission, which monitors electronic commerce to detect fraud, spotted this practice of fraudulent messages in automobile purchases as early as five years ago. She was talked about a lot in Canada last year. It is common in Quebec these days.
In 2024, there will be 3.8 billion fraudulent emails every day. The good news, if there ever was one: fraudulent or misleading emails currently represent “only” 45% of all emails exchanged. In 2011, their proportion was 80%.
Slight detail: we exchanged about half as many emails at the start of the last decade as we do now. So the proportion has gone down, but in absolute terms there are more fraudulent messages than ever on the Internet these days. It’s even worse if we add direct messaging and chat applications.
All these fraud attempts have one and the same goal: to have your property. As the Cynics said so well, jokingly, in another era: soon, they will have it. All this only aims to steal money from slightly distracted Internet users.
We fear the worst with the advent of generative artificial intelligence. It’s completely legitimate. But the Internet was already quite polluted well before ChatGPT…
We want your heart (we’ll have it too!)
An unsuspected impact of generative AI on our relationship with the world is that it will in turn allow us to play the fraudster. There are already cases of pleading in court where a lawyer presented case law created from scratch by a generative AI.
In fact, you probably already have a phone in your pocket that can take photos and then erase the bits that don’t suit you. The Magic Eraser offered by Google and other manufacturers is an AI application that keeps getting better.
At the end of April, the dating site OkCupid went further by offering a new tool to its users: “Erase your Ex”. This tool is the result of an investment of 43 million US dollars by OkCupid’s parent company, the American company IAC.
As its name suggests, Erase your Ex allows you to remove your old flame from your profile photos to better seduce your next crush. Practical, if the photo with the ex is the only one you have of yourself that looks good…
Note that OkCupid particularly targets women with this tool: a survey of 185,000 dating app users revealed that two-thirds of them dreamed of being able to delete their ex from their “good photos”.
Fraudsters and their fake messages attack your wallet. AI and its fake images are attacking your heart.
That’s the magic of the Internet: a huge fraud.