Raise your hand if you didn’t see this coming. Anybody? No one? Ok.
Both The Washington Post and Digital Trends have spotted instances of scam support numbers showing up in Google AI Overviews, reports of which appeared on Facebook and Reddit respectively. Credit unions and banks are also warning their customers about these scams.
Here’s what happens: the unfortunate victim Googles a company name looking for a contact number, then calls the number thrown up by AI. This doesn’t actually lead to the company in question, but rather to someone pretending to be that company, who then tries to take payment information or other sensitive details from the caller.
It’s not clear exactly how these fake numbers are being planted, but the best guess is that they’re being published in multiple low-profile places online, alongside the names of major companies. AI Overviews then comes along and scoops them up, without running the proper checks to verify the information.
The planting of misleading phone numbers by bad actors is not a completely new danger of course; misinformation has been a part of the web for a long, long time. But the design of AI Overviews, which picks out information from the web and presents it as fact rather than encouraging you to do the research yourself, is making people much more susceptible to this kind of con.Of course, it’s not just happening on Google Search. Security researchers have shown how malicious text can be hidden in emails – and presumably documents as well – which is then scraped and summarised by the AI, and served up to the user who takes it as accurate and authentic. The issue is also showing up in other AI search engines.
Who in god’s name are these people having their emails summarized by AI? That sounds awful. Pretty much every AI summary I’ve ever seen is so useless that I just read the original thing anyway. And while we’re on that subject, I have a question for the newspapers in the crowd. If your automatically generated AI summaries are carefully checked for accuracy by human editors, what is even the point? Just write a decent headline and call it a night. It isn’t saving the workers any time or adding anything of value to the reader experience.
But back to our original point.
If you don’t want to be defrauded by AI (and why would you) what’s the best way to avoid it? If you said just go to the company’s website and get the contact info like a normal person, step forward and collect your prize. You can also call our special prize claiming hotline at 1-800-247-8257. That’s 1-800-AISucks. It’s totally safe, and you can take that to the bank if your account hasn’t been compromised.
If you’re looking for a contact phone number or something similar, run a search for the company you’re trying to get in touch with, then use the details on the company’s own website: it may be an extra click or two, but it’s worth it to make sure you’re dealing with correct contact information.
Caution is still required wherever you get your information from, though, especially when it comes to dealing with customer service representatives and discussing anything to do with payments or personal information. Ideally, you want to verify any number you call with a second Google search for it.
Google recommends this as well. The company says it has recently launched a number of updates to further improve scam protections for AI Overviews specifically, but it still encourages people to double-check phone numbers by performing additional searches.
Progress, everybody!