Nowadays, before agreeing to a meeting request from someone she doesn’t previously know, Nicole Yelland performs a thorough background investigation.
Yelland, a public relations specialist for a nonprofit organization in Detroit, says she will run the individual’s data via Spokeo, a personal data aggregator for which she pays a monthly subscription fee. Yelland states that she will jokingly assess the contact’s comprehension and translation skills if they claim to speak Spanish. She will ask the person to join a Microsoft Teams call with their webcam on if anything doesn’t look quite right.
Yelland is paranoid, which is why she sounds that way. Yelland claims that she became entangled in a complex fraud that preyed on job seekers in January, prior to beginning her present charity position. “Now, whenever someone contacts me, I go through the entire verification process,” she tells WIRED.
READ MORE: According To The FBI, Internet Scams Brought In $16.6 Billion Last Year
Digital impersonation schemes are not new; fakery has long been prevalent on dating apps, social networking platforms, and messaging services. Professional communications channels are no longer secure in an era where distributed teams and remote work are the norm. The same AI tools that tech companies claim would increase worker productivity are also making it simpler for fraudsters and criminals to create false identities in a matter of seconds.
It can be challenging to tell the difference between an overly polished, artificial intelligence (AI)-generated imitation and a slightly altered headshot of a genuine person on LinkedIn. Longtime email scammers are switching to posing as humans on live video chats since deepfake videos are becoming so good. The US Federal Trade Commission reports that between 2020 and 2024, the number of job and employment-related scam reports has tripled, and the real damages resulting from these scams have climbed from $90 million to $500 million.
READ MORE: 63K Instagram Accounts Associated With Sextortion Scams Are Removed By Meta
Yelland claims that the con artists who contacted her in January were posing as a reputable business with a genuine product. Even providing a slide PowerPoint detailing the duties of the position they were advertising, the “hiring manager” with whom she spoke via email appeared to be genuine. However, Yelland claims that in the initial video interview, the con artists made strange demands for her driver’s license number and other personal information, and they refused to turn on their cameras during a Microsoft Teams meeting. Yelland slammed her laptop shut after realizing she had been tricked.
Because of how common these schemes have become, AI businesses like GetReal Labs and Reality Defender have surfaced, offering to identify other AI-enabled deepfakes. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is also the founder of Tools for Humanity, an identity-verification firm that manufactures eye-scanning devices that take a person’s biometric information, generate a unique identity identifier, and store that data on the blockchain. Its entire purpose is to demonstrate “personhood,” or that a person is a true human. (Many blockchain developers claim that blockchain is the answer to identity verification.)
READ MORE: Anti-Deepfake Legislation Has Took A Significant Step Toward Becoming Law
However, some business professionals are now using traditional social engineering methods to confirm any interaction that seems suspicious. A person may ask you to send them an email while you’re on the phone, send them a direct message on Instagram to confirm that the LinkedIn message you sent was indeed from you, or ask you to SMS them a photo with a time stamp to verify your identity. Welcome to the Age of Paranoia. According to other coworkers, they even exchange code phrases with one another so that they can make sure they’re not being mislead in the event that something feels strange.
Blockchain software engineer and previous startup founder Daniel Goldman adds, “The funny thing is that the lo-fi approach works.” Goldman claims that after learning that a well-known individual in the cryptocurrency industry had been convincingly deepfaked during a video conversation, he started altering his own conduct. He claims that it made him fear God. He then cautioned his family and friends to email him before taking any action, even if they see him on a video conference or hear what they think is his voice requesting something specific, such cash or an internet password.
According to Ken Schumacher, the creator of the recruitment verification service Ropes, he has experience with hiring managers who ask quick questions about the location that job applicants claim to live in on their resume, including their preferred hangouts and coffee shops. According to Schumacher, if the applicant is indeed based in that area, they ought to be able to reply promptly and precisely.
READ MORE: The Battle Against Deepfakes Now Includes Hardware
Schumacher claims that the “phone camera trick” is another verification technique that some people do. One can ask someone using video chat to show their laptop by holding up their phone camera if they think the other person is being dishonest. The goal is to determine whether the person may be using deepfake software on their computer to hide their real identity or location. However, it’s reasonable to say that this strategy can also be off-putting: Sincere job seekers could be reluctant to show off the interiors of their homes or workplaces for fear that a hiring manager is attempting to find out personal information about them.
According to Schumacher, “everyone is tense and suspicious of each other now.”
ever the most paranoid acknowledge that these checks foster mistrust before two people have ever had a chance to truly interact, even though transforming oneself into a human captcha can be a somewhat effective operational security strategy. They can be a significant time waster as well. Yelland states, “I feel like something has to give.” “Just trying to determine whether people are real is wasting so much of my time at work.”
Jessica Eise, an assistant professor at Indiana University Bloomington who studies social behavior and climate change, says the volume of fraudsters who reply to advertisements for paid virtual surveys has compelled her research team to practically become specialists in digital forensics. (It should come as no surprise that scammers are less interested in the free surveys.) All online participants must be US residents and at least 18 years old if the study is receiving federal funding.
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In order to determine whether participants were in a different time zone, Eise explains, “my team would look at time stamps for when they responded to emails, and if the timing was suspicious.” “We would then search for additional hints that we were able to identify, such as specific email address formats or illegible demographic information.”
According to Eise, her team has reduced the size of the cohort for each study and resorted to “snowball sampling,” which involves enlisting people they know personally to participate in their research, because the time spent screening participants was “exorbitant.” In order to recruit people in person, the researchers are also distributing more paper flyers. “We take great care to ensure that our data is accurate and that we are researching the people we claim to be,” she explains. “I don’t believe this can be solved easily.”
A little common sense can go a long way in identifying evil individuals, barring any mainstream technical solution. Yelland showed me the slide deck she was given as part of the fictitious job offer. It appeared genuine at first, but upon closer inspection, a few features caught her attention. In addition to offering generous paid parental leave, unlimited vacation time, and completely covered health care benefits, the company promised to pay far more than the typical wage for a similar role in her area. That may have been the clearest indication that it was a con in the workplace of today.
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