AI is making tax scams harder to spot

Tax season is here, and with it come scammers hoping to steal your money or even personal information. Now, with AI in the picture, the scams are getting more sophisticated. Some come in the form of emails and text messages posing as the IRS; others mimic legitimate websites and calls.

Don’t feel too awful if you fall for it — a new survey from McAfee found that nearly one in four Americans have been victims of a tax scam, with 18- to 24-year-olds being the hardest hit at 42%.

So how do you stay safe from scammers? “Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour spoke with Abhishek Karnik, the head of threat intelligence research at McAfee. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Sabri Ben-Achour: So, what is the biggest tax scam you're seeing this year?

Abhishek Karnik: The typical ones that you'll start seeing now are urgent messages asking you to file your taxes. At some point, there'll be tax refunds on the way, which will be enticing for people to click on links. So, they turn out to be phishing. In some cases, they can end up being more elaborate scams that end up causing you to lose money. One of the things that's changing the game is AI impersonation scams, and some of these other scams are now enabled in a much bigger way with AI. So, the average loss that consumers are expecting to see is about $1,020 per head.

Ben-Achour: So, if you can't tell from the grammar, if you can't tell from the phone number that's being used, how are we supposed to know when we're getting scammed?

Karnik: Firstly, the IRS would never call you directly, right? Or the IRS would never send you a text message or an email. They typically would contact you by snail mail. So, if somebody tries to contact you, creating that sense of urgency, take that as a red flag. If somebody is asking you to make a payment over a wire transfer, gift card, cashier’s check, cryptocurrency in some cases — that's a huge red flag, I would say. And in this day and age, to be honest, it's very difficult to decipher real from fake. I really think that you need to use some sort of tools to help you. And we are using AI against AI, so to say, in today's world, where we are training models to be able to decipher real from fake or natural language from synthesized data, right? And so you have to use the tools, but you also have to trust your gut.

Ben-Achour: In today's world, if someone realizes that they have been scammed, what can they do?

Karnik: The IRS has a place where you can report it. The FTC has a website where you can report imposters. Go to identitytheft.gov, and some of these government websites which allow you to report against these scams. So generally, building awareness is one thing, but also being a little more cautious, monitoring your credit history, looking for any red flags within your personal information, not over-posting information, not giving away too much information. Very sensitive personal information sets you up for potential scams in the future.