Gus Hurwitz Discusses AI-Driven Financial Scams in Philadelphia Magazine
A Philadelphia Magazine article on rising financial scams cites ICLE’s Gus Hurwitz on how AI is making fraud easier to scale and harder to detect. Gus explains that scammers no longer need to target individuals one by one; AI allows them to automate outreach, build trust, and exploit ordinary mistakes at much larger scale. Read the full piece here.
We’re in a scary place,” explains Justin “Gus” Hurwitz, senior fellow and academic director of the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. AI is making it such that, nowadays, scams operate at scale. “They don’t target individuals — they target everybody,” he says. He puts the math thusly: If you send out 100 million emails or robodial 10 million phone numbers and even .01 percent of people respond to the email or answer the phone, and then you rope in 0.1 percent of those people into a conversation and start building a false sense of trust with those people, it’s possible they’ll ultimately feel trusting enough to do “something stupid.” “It’s just random, hoping to find someone who makes an innocent mistake,” Hurwitz says.
AI is only making it easier. “This could be apocryphal, but I’ve heard rumblings that AI is essentially putting a lot of scammers out of business,” Hurwitz says. It’s not reducing the number of scams, it’s allowing the successful scammers to operate at scale, so they no longer need to have an office building full of people who are spending time developing contacts and trying to bait people. “They can do it more cheaply using AI to do 95 percent of that work.”
Above all, says Hurwitz, listen to your gut. “People don’t give you free stuff,” he says. If you get an email suggesting you have an unclaimed prize, or a text saying you’re entitled to money from a settlement, be skeptical. Never give out information or text codes to your phone — legitimate financial institutions will never ask you for that information. And if you do get something that seems possibly legitimate, don’t call the number on the letter or email you’ve received — look up the number of the agency the sender is claiming to be (ie, call the PPA or PPD if you receive a ticket). Hurwitz also discourages using your debit or checking/ACH account for online payment; at least with credit cards, there can be some recourse.