AI: Why are senior citizens being targeted for online scams? Ritesh Bhatia answers

"It actually happened in China. It has happened in Canada and the chances are that this is just going to increase, not chances in fact I would say yes it is going to increase like anything and that is the reason as of now the only solution is awareness," says Ritesh Bhatia, Cybercrime Investigator & Consultant.
There is a new kind of AI deepfake scam which is typically targeting senior citizens. Can you just explain us the recent incident that has happened?
So, here what is happening, recently what happened was an episode that happened in Kerala with a particular person. He got a call from his former colleague where they used to work together. Now, these are like retired senior citizens and he got a call from his ex-colleague who called up and it was a like audio call over WhatsApp where he said that how have you been and everything, all those kind of things and all and then later again he called back he said listen I am at the airport and my sister-in-law is stuck and has an emergency and some operation needs to be done if you can just transfer Rs 40,000.
Now, this man like he said okay he got a little alerted and he said let me verify if this is true and so he told him do a video call. He did the video call and on the video call he could see his ex-colleague who were working in the same company and then the ex-colleague over the video call was telling him if you could transfer this Rs 40,000 as such and so this guy then believed in it and obviously because the voice is the same, the face is the same so he just made a transfer and later on it turned out to be a fraud.

Now viewers would be wondering how is this particularly thing possible. So, now this is we are in the era of deep fakes, so the voice was cloned, even the entire face of that particular person was cloned as such so someone who was sitting over there was not even like a look alike of somebody, in fact it was a computer like AI generated video and an AI generated voice and similar such scams have been happening world across.

It actually happened in China. It has happened in Canada and the chances are that this is just going to increase, not chances in fact I would say yes it is going to increase like anything and that is the reason as of now the only solution is awareness.

Now talking about these specific AI scam, we did not see much coming up from the data protection bill also regarding AI and the kind of online frauds, at least what was expected was not given in this bill. Now having said that tell us something what is the reason behind senior citizens being targeted because we are not talking about only one scam that is targeted to senior citizens, there are a lot of variety of online scams which are particularly targeting senior citizens, what is the reason behind that?
Yes, so firstly, let us understand one thing, let me give you an example recently there was a spike in something called as the grandparent scams. So what is this grandparent scam basically? So, this is a very old scam wherein somebody would call up the grandfather say listen your grandchild is met with an accident or is arrested or something like that and then they would say please transfer money so they could help them as such and at that point of time they could not make the grandchild speak to the grandparent because this is I am talking about round about eight years back, ten years back but the same grandparent scam has come up in its new avatar which is the AI based avatar, so here what is happening it is actually the grandchild calling the dada or the nana saying that listen I met with an accident and I have been arrested, I need certain money, the caller ID, the phone number is also spoofed because that is pretty easy for scamsters to do it, the number is also spoofed, the voice is spoofed, the video is spoofed and if you say are we talking about some black mirror episode?

No, this is actually happening, even if you go and Google like grandparent scams AI, you will see a whole lot of them right now like happening in Australia, in Canada, in US, so we are not far behind. So here when the grandfather hears, he definitely gets emotional, he or she, and at that point of time you only and only trust and now you trust because you hear the voice, you hear the voice of the child, you hear the voice, you see the video of the child, so there is no reason for you like not to believe that this is not your child and that is the reason you transfer.

So, number one, why they fall victims, they are not very well aware about the latest in cyber threats because every day there is so much new and it is difficult for them to catch up as such. I think we the younger generation we have been very irresponsible because what we have done we have just given them the gadgets and we have not trained them, we do not make them aware on a daily basis, maybe we get irritated, maybe we say oh! forget it you need not know, but I think this is something that they need to hear, they need to talk more than they need to do us and secondly, it is their trusting nature, our parents, grandparents come from an era where trust was the key thing, that time there was nothing like cyber, but on cyber it is exactly the opposite thing that there is nothing like trust.

So, just to elaborate on the point where you also said that certain kind of handholding is needed for grandparents or for senior citizen. How exactly can one do it because see that is the kind of age we are talking about where it is very difficult for them to learn something new, how according to you can grandkids or maybe to their parents how can one handhold and teach them different aspect of online security, basic things like how to even surf the net, I think not clicking on the link that looks very attractive and appealing to you, how can you do that?
Well I think ET Now can do it very well because you guys have done so many shows about it, you can actually create a one hour or a two hour session on it, you can create a two-hour like you can compile all your videos and you can just put them up that itself will be good. A lot of things were expected from the data protection bill but then on your lines of expectation one to ten where would you rate this bill, all the questions and all the concerns that were raised are they all answered and addressed?
I do not think so, I would rate it only five. Ideally, we as the largest user base I would say of internet and of generating data, I expected a much more strong bill which was there like somewhere when Justice Srikrishna came out with it, this looks to be a very-very watered down one, giving a lot of power to the government also and everything has left that as and when it will be decided, so we are already quite late with the data bill.

Nevertheless, it is a great thing, at least we have come with it and I hope the ministry catches up and adds a lot many things, especially like look at AI things.

Also, there is no mention about the new-age technologies, about the emerging technologies which are collecting so much of data, especially in this era of artificial intelligence, blockchain and internet of things, IoT, a lot much data is being collected, so then what about that? So, I think those provisions need to be added immediately is what I feel.