YORK COUNTY, Pa. — Artificial intelligence is now becoming more sophisticated and it has basically eliminated the old red flags we used to tell you to watch out for when it comes to scams.
Recently, a scammer tried to trick a FOX43 employee to take a new job, but she was able to spot the red flags before losing any money.
FOX43 Finds Out how artificial intelligence is making it harder to tell if a job posting is real or fake.
"The initial person who told me it was a scam was my mom because moms are good at that sort of thing," said Melanie Crisamore, who is talking about an email about a potential job.
"I received an email from somebody named Nicholas Wolf who said he was part of the HR department at the Washington Post," she explained.
Crisamore checked the email address from the sender and it seemed like the real thing.
"I thought it was off because I never applied for this position," said Crisamore, but she knows companies hire recruiters, especially in today's job market.
The job seemed like a sweet deal too: $55 dollars an hour, flexible hours, and remote work. After an initial conversation, she was told the VP of Human Resources would reach out to her. She started googling his name.
"His LinkedIn pops up. He's worked at the Post for 17 years. At this point, this LinkedIn looks very legit. He's the VP of HR he has a picture, a person, and an address, everything to me looks legitimate," said Crisamore.
When she took the call, the person kept pushing the idea that she would have to buy an iPad. That was the red flag.
She said, "Buy this iPad from your mobile carrier and we will put your bank information into it and give you a reimbursement. So that's their shtick."
At this point, she knew it was a scam.
"They could have easily created a job description just for me enough that I thought to myself 'This is perfect!' and that's their thing," said Crisamore.
Dr. Bruce Young, a cybersecurity expert at Harrisburg University, says artificial intelligence is the technology used in this scam, adding "Artificial intelligence is able to go out and pull very specific information that's real from social media accounts."
He says a scam like this may only take a few minutes to create, "Somebody can go out, pull all this information together, put together a scam, or a campaign, and just target it out."
New ways to spot a fake email address
Remember that email address that looked real?
Crisamore learned a new way to double check that.
It took several steps to eventually get the IP address of that email - which led her back to name cheap inc. which is a domain hosting site.
"It's so scary to think that in our world you have to go through 5 or 6 steps to make sure that you are safe, but it can happen to anybody and it happens every single day," said Crisamore.
Young says your best defense is finding a phone number yourself and picking up the phone to confirm everything you're being told is true.
If you have a story you want Jackie De Tore to look into, FOX43 wants to find out. Send her a message on Facebook or send an email to FOX43FindsOut@FOX43.com.