About nine in 10 Canadians also believe that AI use will increase scam attempts
A growing number of Canadians have expressed concerns regarding fraud risks as the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in scams increased among fraudsters, a recent poll by the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) found.
In its annual Fraud Prevention Month Poll, it was found that about 75% of the respondents were more concerned about fraud compared to how they were before. About 88% of them also believed that AI use in scam attempts will increase over the next year while 89% said that it will make people even more vulnerable to fraud.
About 81% of respondents said AI would make fraud attempts through phones harder to detect, with the same percentage worried about voice cloning and impersonation scams.
“With the recent rise in voice cloning and deepfakes, fraudsters are able to employ a new level of sophistication to phone and online scams. The good news is that awareness of these types of scams is high, but we also need to take action to safeguard ourselves from fraudsters,” said Kevin Purkiss, vice president, fraud management at RBC.
The top three types of fraud seen by respondents were phishing (generic scams through emails or texts), spear phishing (emails or texts that look legitimate), and vishing (targeted phone or voicemail scams). Around 56% of respondents also said they had seen an increase when it comes to deepfake scams while about 47% said they had noticed an increasing number of scams using voice cloning.
The RBC survey involved 1,502 adult Canadians who were members of the online Angus Reid Forum.
