It’s estimated that one in ten seniors have been victims of elder abuse. That can take many forms, including physical, emotional and financial.
Baltimore County officials say seniors are getting more worried about how artificial intelligence is being used to prey on them.
At the Cockeysville Senior Center recently, Noah O’Ryan wanted to get a read of the room.
“Raise your hand if you have gotten a scammy text message in the past week,” O’Ryan said.
Most people raised their hands.
O’Ryan is a regional program manager for Older Adults Technology Services which is affiliated with AARP. He acknowledges there were plenty of scams before artificial intelligence.
“If it’s not AI before it was photoshopped images or people taking a lot of news clips of someone and editing it in such a way so it sounds like they’re saying something that they’re not,” O’Ryan said. “I would say none of this is new, these are just newer ways of doing the same old thing.”
Shirley Garrett said she can usually spot something that’s fake.
Garrett said, “I’ve seen pictures where it just doesn’t match up or a person’s leg goes through a dog or something like that. You can tell.”
But AI makes swindles easier, cheaper and faster to produce. And with each passing year, more convincing.
Take deep fakes, which are deceptive videos. O’Ryan said fake videos that used to take days to produce now can be done in minutes. And while you can often pick out a deep fake, maybe there’s something weird about the facial expression for instance, that’s likely to change.
“The unfortunate thing about all of this is that this is where it’s at now,” O’Ryan said. “It is just getting better. You can see examples from two years ago of AI generated videos and they look worse than what they look like today.”
Lynn McCamie, Ombudsman Program Manager with Baltimore County’s Department of Aging, said they’re getting more calls from seniors concerned about what’s lurking out there, such as voice cloning.
McCamie said, “Used to be days where you could tell, robot, we know this is a robot, we know this is an auto robo call but now they start off really with ‘Hi Ethel how are you today?’ and they don’t know the difference and before you know it someone’s identity or their finances may have been compromised.”
Of course, money and privacy aren’t always on the line. Lynn Weaver gets annoyed about disinformation that targets her soap operas.
Weaver said, “They put up things that this person died or that person died and all. And it’s not true. It's a scam.”
Jeff, he didn’t want to use his last name, said he’s careful about the internet and what he looks at online.
He said, “If you had told us that this type of thing would be happening, let’s say 25 years ago you said to somebody, ‘You’re going to have this thing in your house and it’s going to monitor what you think and what you say and it’s going to listen to you to some degree and target you with ads and send you this and send you that,’ you probably would have said, ‘What, you’re crazy, I’d never have that.’ And yet, this is what we have.”
So here are a few tips to keep from getting scammed.
Verify everything. For instance, if a video claims to be from CNN, go to CNN.com to make sure.
If a friend or relative calls and asks for money, make sure it’s really them.
Be skeptical of anything that provokes an emotional reaction.
If you get a questionable text, report it and delete it. And talk to a real person about what they’re seeing out there.
“Elder abuse often is silent,” said Heang Tan, Baltimore County’s Director of Aging. “With AI it’s happening so often and people aren’t aware that they’re being taken advantage of.”
AARP has a website that includes a free hotline number seniors can call with questions as well as classes they can take about the internet.
