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Imagine getting a video call from a husband or son in a hospital bed pleading for money to pay the hospital bill. They look panicked and if you don’t help them pay the bill they will be sent to jail.
That actually happened to a retired couple from Cape Town who received the call, believing they were talking to their son. The parents transferred the money via EFT without hesitation. The next morning they contacted their son, only to find out the whole thing had been a scam.
The thieves had used AI voice and face cloning to convince the parents that their son was in hospital.
It’s becoming more common and the technology is getting frighteningly good.
In another case, scammers used voice cloning to impersonate the CEO of a UK energy firm. They called the finance team requesting an urgent payment. The cloned voice was so convincing that the staff authorised a transfer of hundreds of thousands of pounds.
With crypto and stablecoins becoming faster and easier to transfer, this is now becoming a hot target for scammers.
Added sting
On this Moneyweb Crypto podcast, Thalia Pillay, co-founder and CEO of Orca Fraud, explains that scams are becoming more sophisticated by the day with an added sting – the scammers are able to fool you into believing you are talking to someone to know and love.
“These are the exact cases we’re seeing each and every day at Orca Fraud.
“Fraudsters are really preying on urgency in order to defraud victims. And using AI is just making things a hundred times worse,” says Pillay.
“You can imagine that for all the good uses of AI, be it vibe coding, be it using Claude to send your mom a birthday invitation, fraudsters have the exact same tools.”
In the past, it was easier to detect fraud – there were grammatical errors and poor English in the messages being sent by scammers. Now AI fixes that.
“With AI, it’s hyper-personalised. They know exactly who you are. They’re also able to reach a far wider audience. So every time you see a scam, it’s not just you that’s being targeted, it’s probably a hundred thousand other people.”
A good scammer is one who has the patience to build trust, such as in romance scams. These can take 12 or 18 months to build trust. That investment in time is worth it for the scammer if the bounty is large enough – many victims have lost their entire life savings once they are convinced by the scammer to help out in a fabricated life-threatening situation.
The lesson, says Pillay, is never allow yourself to mix passion and money.
“A big thing in South Africa at the moment is investment scams that typically target the elderly and try to get them to invest into different crypto platforms. What makes it really devastating is it’s someone who is building trust, not just over a single point in time, but over the course of 12 to 18 months.
“You’ll be horrified at how many people you know have actually been a victim of a romance scam, but they just are too embarrassed to talk about it.”
Spikes and bursts
Two increasingly common scams are what are known as “spike” and “burst” attacks.
A spike attack is a sudden, high-volume flood of scam attempts aimed at overwhelming a target (usually a company’s fraud detection systems or customer service) so the fraudulent activity slips through undetected.
A burst attack is similar but more targeted. Scammers send a short, intense “burst” of activity from multiple accounts or devices in quick succession. These typically involve dozens of small transactions or login attempts within minutes with the aim of testing security systems or to rapidly drain accounts before alerts are triggered.
Pillay says Orca uses behavioural analytics to detect these scams early – many of which involve remittances using stablecoins.
“We look at all the different data points associated with the individual, and it’s not just their payments and their transactional data, it’s also who they are, their KYC [Know Your Customer], their device information, their behaviour on the device. Do you tap with the left hand, do you tap with a right hand? All of that really helps us build a holistic view of who the person is.”
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