Well it's that time of the new year again where
I talk about some new scams that unfortunately scammers have come up with to watch out for this
year. I'm ThioJoe and I've got about 10 of them and some of them are not just new variations on
old scams, but pretty much new scams altogether thanks to new technology. Real quick before
we jump in, this video isn't sponsored but it's sponsored by me and I'm going to promote
my hilarious Instagram page. Usually I post some funny memes and stuff on here as stories
or posts. Should be pretty entertaining or, of course you can subscribe to this channel.
So let's just jump into it. Starting off with number one we have so called recovery scams where
scammers actually prey on people who have already been scammed. And I wanted to mention this one
first because it's one that you'll probably see in the very comment section of this video. So if
you see comments anywhere not just YouTube but on Facebook or Instagram saying, "Oh thanks you
so much to this person for recovering my funds!" Those are also scams don't believe it, just report
them and move on. Next up is one I hadn't seen before but I guess I'm not surprised, and that
is fake AI generated product listings. Someone on Reddit posted about Facebook marketplace listings
for these fake cat shaped chairs that do look cool but unfortunately are totally fake and generated
by AI. Apparently these are usually listed for way cheaper than what even would make sense like maybe
$50, and unfortunately on the Facebook listings there was replies by a lot of people who thought
they were real. But it wasn't just chairs, someone else posted about how they saw on Etsy fake
crochet patterns for sale. I had to look this one up to understand but basically I guess if you're
going to crochet pieces of clothing, you typically use a pattern that you might buy or download
and it tells you how to get a certain look of a final product. And what the scammers are doing
are basically generating AI images of some cool looking piece of clothing and saying, "Oh we're
selling you this crochet pattern you buy it and you'll have the download", but it turns out when
you go to download it, the resulting thing you create looks absolutely nothing like the image.
It was just made up, and you can see a lot of reviews people saying just that. So going forward
especially with AI images becoming more and more realistic, you're just going to have to kind of go
with reputable sellers, reputable websites, read the reviews and hope they're not fake reviews and
again it could be literally anything from chairs to crochet patterns you never know what it's going
to be. Next up number three another scam made possible thanks to AI are deepfake celebrity
endorsements for products that are scams. In this case they've been fake giveaways for the
cookware brand and I'm going to butcher this name, Le Creuset and they involve video ads pretending
to be from Gordon Ramsay, Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez. And at the core of these ads they're like
typical fake giveaways that say, "Oh go to this link you'll get a free thing" and you put in your
credit card info, they either steal your money or your credit card info, or both. But the difference
here is they use voice cloning typically, to make it sound like the celebrity is actually
talking in the voiceover for these. For the ones I've seen the videos do include short clips of the
celebrity talking but they don't really sync up, they look kind of fake if you look closely and
they're only for a few seconds probably taken from some random interview. But what's crazy
is these ads are actually still going. I went on Facebook's Ad Library, which if you're not
aware, you can go on and actually search actively running ads on Facebook. And I literally searched
"free Le Creuset" and had hundreds of results of actively running scam ads pretending to be
celebrities like yes Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, others. And they all seem to have the same script
they basically say, "Oh due to a packaging error there's 3,000 sets of cookware that we can't sell
so we're just giving them away." And some of these have been running for over a week it's wild.
So yes this is an active scam, it's only going to become more common, I'm surprised Facebook
hasn't done anything about this. I was able to find hundreds of these on the first search that
I did. Come on Facebook, do better. All right moving on we have an interesting phone scam that
involves downloading an app, I hadn't seen this one before. Apparently this scam, at the moment,
has mostly been seen in China but I bet it will move over here eventually. But basically how it
works is you get a phone call from the scammer, they pretend to be law enforcement, and say that
"Oh you have some legal case against you you're going to be arrested", whatever they want to say,
and at some point they direct you to download an app on your phone. But what's interesting is
not only is the app itself malware of course, I'll get to that. But they actually give you
a case number that they tell you to type into the app to look up your case, and it will actually
return a result with legal looking documents. And they actually will have the names and stuff filled
into the document to make it look a lot more legitimate. But the main part of the scam is that,
like I said the app itself is malware, and some way I'm not really sure, the app ends up stealing
your bank account details. Maybe by phishing or if you have that bank app installed it'll steal from
that, and the scammers end up being able to break into your bank account and drain your money. But
here's the extra clever thing. That malware app will actually block incoming calls and texts so
if your bank tries to contact you about the fraud, they won't be able to contact you at all, and I
wouldn't be surprised if it also redirects text messages with like verification codes and stuff
to the scammer. Now, in this case the app was only for Android but I wouldn't be surprised
if we start to see this with iPhone as well, especially within the European Union, apple is
going to be forced to allow people to install apps outside the App Store. You might see social
engineering where they convince people to install these app files from outside the Google Play
Store, which is what they did in this case, or outside the iTunes App Store so basically if
you ever get any kind of call in the future where they try to convince you to download an app, yeah
don't believe that. All right next up number five, this is kind of like a second part of a scam
I guess you'd call it, where for people who have had their phone stolen, usually it ends up in
China or some other country where they try to then sell the phone. However in these places they can
get more money if they can convince you to remove the iCloud lock on that phone, otherwise they just
have to sell it for parts. So really the scam here is the part where they try to convince you or
trick you into removing the iCloud lock. These are real examples someone posted on Reddit. It's
basically a whole saga of escalating threats and trickery from these scammers. The first thing the
scammers tried was to pretend to be Apple support saying stuff like, "Oh your phone was jailbroken
and you better remove this because it'll affect your credit" somehow, and also "It'll affect your
warranty on your new phone" somehow. And of course they show you instructions on how to remove the
phone, hoping that you'll just go and do it. When that didn't work they contacted them from
another email address, this time pretending to be another person and trying to guilt trip them,
and saying "Oh I bought this phone secondhand, I didn't realize it was stolen", and include a
big sob story about how their daugter is angry at them, a bunch of nonsense really. And for the next
stage they try to scare you by saying that "All your info is still on the phone, the erasure that
you did didn't work and they have all your info, and they're going to sell it as an auction,
and it's going to go to the highest bidder, and all your info is going to be out there leaked.
Unless of course you remove the lock," they say, "Then your info will be safe and gone." Of course
more nonsense. But finally when that didn't work the scammers started sending violent and nasty
threats that I'm probably gonna have to blur out, but included a video that they probably just
found on the internet, of someone showing a gun and stuff like that saying "I'm gonna come
to your house and do this and that". Of course this is all just a fake script. Someone in the
replies to the reddit post said that they've literally seen the same exact messages that have
been copy and pasted, sent to other people who have had their phone stolen, it's all fake. It's
designed to trick you or scare you so that you'll eventually remove the iCloud lock so that they can
sell the phone as usable instead of having to sell it as parts. And apparently the way they get your
contact info is it'll show the Apple ID of the person who owns the phone I guess. The best thing
to do is simply block the numbers, ignore them, don't even respond. All right now we're up to
number six, and in the age of lots of online scams it turns out that physical mail scams are making
a comeback. I've seen at least two examples in the past year. One was reported on by Brian Krebs a
security researcher who showed how people who own domains are getting targeted with mail, saying
that you have to pay some fake registration fee for your domain or it'll get taken. But of course
it's fake and they're just hoping that some people will buy it. And I believe this is mostly for
people who don't have the privacy setting on their "WHOIS" information it's called. So if you
know what that is, just make sure you use that. And another very different example in the state of
Tennessee in the US, there were scammers that were sending out fake government documents that said
you have to pay some fee for whatever reason. And the form they used was an actual form, but it was
not for that purpose that they were saying in the scam, and they just filled in a bunch of bogus
info with some fee. And presumably they have you either go online or call in and they steal your
credit card or they have you buy gift cards. Whatever the usual way is after they get you on
the hook. All right on to number seven, this one was actually interesting, and it turns out that
scammers have been targeting the parents of high school kids in a phone scam where they call the
household and say that their kid had bought test prep materials for the ACT and SAT standardized
tests. And they simply say, "Well before we ship it out we need the payment details can you give us
your email, credit card, stuff like that". And the parents might just think, "Oh okay I guess they
want to be prepared for the SAT, that's great", and then give the scammer the info. But to make it
more convincing, the scammers apparently have been using real info with the actual people's
names that they call, probably from some stolen database breach that happened, and so they
actually know some info about you, so it makes it highly targeted and much more believable. But I
bet even if you don't have high school kids they could adapt this scam to be anything saying your
husband or wife ordered this thing and they need to pay for it, stuff like that. So always be
diligent and be suspicious if someone randomly calls you trying to get you to pay for something
you don't remember ordering. Next up, number eight is the jury duty scam that apparently has been
around for a while but is becoming more popular, and it's pretty straightforward. Basically a phone
scammer will call you pretending to be the police or the government and they'll spoof the phone
number to make it look like it's coming from a police department, and they'll say something like,
"you have a warrant out for your arrest because you skipped on jury duty and you failed to appear
to the summons", stuff like that. And of course there's a fine that you can conveniently solve by
just giving your credit card info over the phone, of course it's just a scam. And they'll give you
the usual threats like if you don't pay you'll be arrested or you'll have a warrant after your
arrest all sorts of stuff. And again there was a post on reddit from someone who experienced
this scam and they almost fell for it because they actually had gotten a jury summons the month
before. So I guess if you call enough people, then you'll get someone who recently in the past
several months got a jury summons and they might be more likely to believe it. All right we're up
to number nine, we got a couple more, though I do have a bonus one at the end. And number nine is a
scam that happens at a gas station they're calling "pump switching." Apparently how it works is after
you're done pumping your gas, when you're going to put it away a scammer will walk up to you and
offer to help you out by putting the gas nozzle back on the thing, or even potentially offering
to pump your gas in the first place. And I guess somehow they make it seem like when they go to put
the nozzle back they don't actually do it, so that eventually when you drive away they take the thing
back off the nozzle and then fill up their own car. And because they didn't put the nozzle back,
it didn't close that credit card transaction, so that person who drove away now ends up paying
for their gas as well. All right finally up to number 10, but again I have the bonus one next is
the ozempic scam. If you haven't heard of this, it's basically a weight loss drug that used to be
for diabetes I think, and there's a shortage of it I guess. And because it's sold out, scammers took
advantage of it, and apparently scammers put up a bunch of sites about how you can buy it online
without a prescription and it's cheaper. A pretty run-of-the-mill scam if you ask me, but the target
in this case is new, it's a new thing that people have been using, so just be aware of that. All
right now finally this is more of a general thing so I didn't want to include it in the regular
list. I already talked about ai-generated scams, and here I just want to emphasize how quickly fake
AI-generated images are becoming, because even if you might think they're not really realistic
now, I guarantee you in a year or two they're going to be indistinguishable. For example
here are images from back in February 2021, the state of the art at the time, just three
years ago, openAI's DALL-E model. This wasn't even public but these are some examples they gave
of prompts such as "A kitchen with a fridge stove and sink" and "a group of animals standing in the
snow". You can kind of tell what it's supposed to be but I don't think anyone could be using
these to convince someone it's a real image. But remember that was the state of the art. Here
are some examples from public image generators at the time and these basically just look like blobs.
However just one year later in April 2022, OpenAI announced their DALL-E 2 model. This one they did
open up to the public and here are some examples I created using DALL-E 2 myself. Obviously these
look way better, though you can still tell that they look weird in a lot of places. Like if
you look closely it's pretty obvious that these are not real photographs. And at this point
it was able to start generating photos of people, although again in a lot of places like the eyes it
still looked weird, you could tell that probably wasn't real. But then only about six months later
in October of 2022, we got Stable Diffusion 1.5, a public free open source model that you could
download and use on your own computer, and this did not have any kind of censorship, but of course
it doesn't stop there. Then in 2023 we got a whole bunch of new models such as Stable Diffusion XL,
MidJourney V5, and DALL-E 3, and these are all capable of generating convincing photo realistic
images. And the latest models such as DALL-E 3 and MidJourney V6, they can even generate legible
text to some degree. It's only going to get even better, it's just going to be more and more
realistic, and yes there's even AI generated video coming down the pipe. Right now they don't
look very realistic, they look kind of janky. But again it kind of looks like DALL-E 2 or DALL-E
1 level of quality, and we know already what happened just two to three years later after that.
So going forward you have to be extremely vigilant about what could be potentially fake AI generated
images. If you see something totally outrageous online, maybe take a bit more time to research it
and see if it's actually real. So yeah hopefully at least going forward you'll now be a little bit
more prepared to know what to look out for. If you enjoyed this video be sure to definitely give it
a big giant thumbs up for the youtube algorithm, I'll show you some humorous AI generated images
here. And also consider subscribing, I try to make videos about twice a week, usually Wednesday
and Saturday. If you want to keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is last year's
2023 Scams to Watch Out For, because they haven't stopped using those, they just started
using new additional ones. I'll put that link right here you can click on. So thanks so much
for watching and I'll see you in the next one.
