The Future of the Con Is Already Here, It's Just Not Evenly Distributed
This title could be clearer and more informative.Try out Clickbait Shieldfor free (5 uses left this month).
LLMs are collapsing the cost barrier between cheap spray-and-pray scams and expensive targeted attacks, enabling sophisticated, personalized cons to be run at scale in a 'for loop'. A detailed scenario illustrates how an LLM could orchestrate a fake job interview to steal credentials, monitor accounts, drain funds, and cover its tracks — all autonomously. The post argues that existing security heuristics (fluent writing means a real person, video calls are trustworthy) are breaking down because LLMs make previously expensive signals cheap to fake. Practical countermeasures include spoken family passwords, hardware FIDO2 2FA, verifying through outbound channels you initiate, and recognizing the structural skeleton of scams (urgency, secrecy, unusual channels). Institutions and regulators will need to adapt, but that will take time, and scams are expected to skyrocket in the interim.
