My accountant explained I needed to move my Bitcoin to a more secure wallet, because the IRS upgraded how it calculates cryptocurrency taxes after the meltdown of FTX. I begrudgingly complied; even though, there is nothing more annoying than trying to keep track of seed phrases and all the other security measures of a standalone wallet. Then I linked my new wallet to the website he provided to generate the tax report.
The accountant, who has done my taxes for over a decade, assured me the following day that my tokens would be returned after the report was generated. A few dozen more confusing emails over the course of that week—in addition to his just having missed the deadline to file my girlfriend’s returns—had me asking whether his judgement was waning in old age. When yet another email did not quite make sense, I called to find out what was going on with him.
The emails were not from my accountant at all. I had been phished and my assets stolen.
Looking back, I can see all the clever ways the criminals tricked me. They mimicked my accountant’s signature in the body of the text down to the font as well as all his contact information, but with tiny details altered, such as replacing an “8” with a “6” in his fax number and adding an “s” to the end of the originating email address in a way that I could not see on my phone or desktop. And the emails were personal, reassuring, sometimes apologetic, and responsive to my various questions.
Worse: this was the second time I had been conned. In 2020, I signed a contract with what turned out to be an elaborately faked crypto investment firm claiming to mine Bitcoins in Iceland. Prices were skyrocketing, so their projections sounded plausible with guarantees that made it significantly less risky than holding Bitcoins directly. Again, it all started with a trusted contact, someone who had invested in one of my own events. She invited me to join a crypto group with dozens of members, all of whom ended up similarly caught in the Ponzi scheme.
I am not an idiot or some vulnerable senior citizen losing his faculties (not yet). On the contrary, I have a doctorate that includes training in advanced statistics and in risk management, I have run the finances of multiple organizations and have made a living off my own investment strategies for decades, even writing featured articles for The Motley Fool back in the day.
But I sure feel like an idiot. Few things in life offer the gut punch of realizing your money is gone—stolen with little chance of getting it back. I informed the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and other authorities, but never heard back even three years since that first scam.
I am far from alone. Cybercrime was estimated to reach $8 trillion globally in 2023, a staggering financial impact that would rank as the world’s third largest economy after the U.S. and China. With nearly 5 million phishing attacks last year (a combination of social engineering and technical subterfuge like what just happened to me), such incidents are more than doubling annually. The World Economic Forum ranks cybercrime among the top-ten global threats along with climate change and forced migration. Warren Buffet has called it “the number one problem with mankind," a bigger threat than even nuclear weapons.
Now add A.I. to the mix. Who do you think will be among earliest adopters? Tech-savvy criminals, of course. Sure, we have seen fake news and social media bots that affect national politics but consider A.I. systematizing the best techniques of conmen reaching directly into your pocketbook, which, if you are like me, is entirely online. With almost everybody’s personal data (social security number, date of birth, etc.) now on the dark web and soon tens of millions of phishing attacks every year, what will stop A.I.-driven cybercrime from robbing everyone?
In a world with readily available A.I., would I even see my money was gone or just falsely displayed numbers? Could I tell if my accountant was talking to me on the phone or is it a deep audio fake? A.I. is the perfect tool to increase the breadth and depth of cybercrime by orders of magnitude.
A.I. leaders warn of the “risk of extinction,” and who does not fear the creation of some form of artificially sentient creatures with different priorities than human survival? But my bet is the first wave of societal-level A.I. hazard will not be driven by some computerized “other” or even by a hostile foreign nation; but rather, by the quickest criminals among us.
Meanwhile, instead of filling out another unanswered IC3 form for my most recent theft, I was determined to speak with a real human being to get attention to my problem. An officer at my local police precinct took a report, but clearly was not going to do anything with it other than give me a case number. He suggested calling the state’s cybercrime unit, which I did. They only have an answering machine, and no one called back.
After waiting on hold with the FBI, I actually reached an IC3 staff member. She told me to fill out the form. I protested about not having heard back in three years from my previous attempt, to which she said, “I’m sorry you feel that way,” and hung up.
My fake accountant was more helpful than that. I can only imagine what he will do once he masters whatever comes after ChatGPT.