AI was supposed to take scammers’ jobs, but it gave them superpowers instead

For anyone worried that AI would eliminate every profession except the one sending messages about your frozen crypto account, there's unwelcome news for that last bastion of human enterprise. Fraud has found an automation budget.Scamming has always required a surprising amount of manual labor. Romance scams need someone to keep a conversation going for weeks, investment fraud needs someone to answer questions and maintain a believable identity, and impersonation scams need someone to keep the act together long enough to transfer money. AI can now do more of that work, meaning the same criminal operation can reach far more people without adding more humans.That's what FATF president Giles Thomson meant when he told the Financial Times this month that AI could let “one or two people in a basement with a very big server” do work that once required a much larger scam operation. It's a grimly efficient version of the productivity boom every other industry has been promised.The important change isn't that AI is about to make scammers unemployed. It's that every scam becomes cheaper to run. One person can maintain more fake identities, carry on more conversations, and attempt more fraud a...