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.