Researchers within the US have reportedly used OpenAI’s voice API to create AI-powered telephone rip-off brokers that may very well be used to empty victims’ crypto wallets and financial institution accounts.
As reported by The Register, pc scientists on the College of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) used OpenAI’s GPT-4o mannequin, in tandem with plenty of different freely obtainable instruments, to construct the agent they are saying “can indeed autonomously execute the actions necessary for various phone-based scams.”
Based on UIUC assistant professor Daniel Kang, telephone scams that contain perpetrators pretending to be from a enterprise or authorities group goal round 18 million Individuals yearly and value someplace within the area of $40 billion.
GPT-4o permits customers to ship it textual content or audio and have it reply in variety. What’s extra, in response to Kang, it’s not expensive to do, which breaks down a serious a barrier to entry for scammers trying to steal private data similar to financial institution particulars or social safety numbers.
Certainly, in response to the paper co-authored by Kang, the typical value of a profitable rip-off is simply $0.75.
Learn extra: Hong Kong busts crypto rip-off that used AI deepfakes to create ‘superior women’
In the course of the course of their analysis, the staff carried out plenty of totally different experiments, together with crypto transfers, reward card scams, and the theft of person credentials. The typical general success price of the totally different scams was 36% with most failures resulting from AI transcription errors.
“Our agent design is not complicated,” mentioned Kang. “We carried out it in simply 1,051 strains of code, with a lot of the code devoted to dealing with real-time voice API.
“This simplicity aligns with prior work showing the ease of creating dual-use AI agents for tasks like cybersecurity attacks.”
He added, “Voice scams already cause billions in damage and we need comprehensive solutions to reduce the impact of such scams. This includes at the phone provider level (e.g., authenticated phone calls), the AI provider level (e.g., OpenAI), and at the policy/regulatory level.”
The Register experiences that OpenAI’s detection techniques did certainly alert it to UICU’s experiments and moved to reassure customers that it “uses multiple layers of safety protections to mitigate the risk of API abuse.”
It additionally warned, “It is against our usage policies to repurpose or distribute output from our services to spam, mislead, or otherwise harm others — and we actively monitor for potential abuse.”
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