Scammers Using AI to Impersonate Small Businesses
April 1, 2024
Scammers are using AI to impersonate small businesses by copying their videos, logos, and social media posts. They create fake listings and ads, diverting customers to cheap knockoffs or stealing their money. This has severely impacted businesses like Bee Cups, Darn Tough Vermont, and Cascade hummingbird feeders, leading to significant financial losses, negative reviews, and damaged reputations. Their deployment of AI makes it challenging for small businesses to combat these fraudulent activities.
- Alleged deployer
- unknown-scammers
- Alleged developer
- openai, unknown-ai-developers
- Alleged harmed parties
- small-businesses, small-business-customers, small-business-employees, bee-cups, darn-tough-vermont, jim-carter
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/706
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.