Scammers have unfortunately evolved in their methods.
Those modern-day scamming methods now involve AI — they’re used to create deepfake videos and photos meant to impersonate people to elicit financial transactions, clone people’s voices for use in phone calls that scare loved ones into sending money for urgent “emergencies” and generate phishing emails that look incredibly legit to the unknowing eye.
Now the average person has another reason to fear AI scammers and that newly revealed scare is tied to your innocent selfie pics where you’re simply throwing up the peace sign. Researchers have now discovered that the innocent picture pose can lead scammers to use AI to copy anyone’s fingerprint and use it for nefarious purposes.
Here’s how that worrying trend is done.
Be careful not to post those peace sign selfies on social media
A report from the South China Morning Post pointed to this new AI scam becoming a major privacy concern, as financial expert Li Chang explained.
Chang pointed out that scammers can easily use AI to extract anyone’s fingerprints from selfies taken within 1.5 meters, as long as the person’s fingers are directly facing the camera. To make matters even more alarming, it was also pointed out that those same types of selfies that are taken at a distance of 1.5 to 3 meters, around half of the person’s exposed hand details can be stolen as fingerprint data from a scammer using AI.
Chang made it clear that scammers can employ the photo-editing features AI tools are known for to make blurry fingerprints look as sharp as possible and transform low-resolution fingerprint shots into highly visible biometric data. Because biometric identifiers like fingerprints can easily be stolen by scammers using AI, data breaches that result in cases of identity theft and financial losses can spring up due to this sophisticated scam.
A recent report from the Google Threat Intelligence group noted how AI-enabled scams are becoming more prominent. “Threat actors now pursue anonymized, premium tier access to models through professionalized middleware and automated registration pipelines to illicitly bypass usage limits,” the report stated. “This infrastructure enables large scale misuse of services while subsidizing operations through trial abuse and programmatic account cycling.”
The best way to avoid getting caught in this AI-powered scam is simple: stop taking high-resolution peace sign selfies altogether. And it might be worth letting your friends and loved ones know it’s worth taking down their peace sign selfies just to be safe. Blurring, pixelating or smoothing out the appearance of one’s hands in those types of pictures that are posted online is also worth doing before posting those peace sign selfies online if you’re still intent on doing so.
Bottom line
As scammers become more inclined to bring AI tools into their web of scams, new threats arise and make it easier for them to pull sensitive information and money from unsuspecting victims. We have now entered the age of AI, where people’s peace sign selfies can expose someone’s fingerprint ridges and be extracted by scammers to bypass their locks on smartphones, banking apps, smart home systems and more.
As always, be vigilant with whatever you post online and refrain from posting the sort of pics that could expose you to AI scams.
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