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AI Incidents

Generative AI Allegedly Used to Facilitate $255,000 Real Estate Fraud Scheme

August 23, 2024

A real estate scam is reported to have used AI-generated phishing emails to impersonate a title company lawyer, tricking homebuyer Raegan Bartlo into wiring $255,000 to a fraudulent account. The emails were alleged to be convincing, with no grammatical errors or tone issues. Bartlo recovered part of the funds but lost $112,000.
Alleged deployer
unknown-scammers
Alleged developer
unknown-generative-ai-tools-creators
Alleged harmed parties
real-estate-market, raegan-bartlo, financial-institutions

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/864

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.