Every day, millions of Americans receive emails and text messages designed to steal their money or personal information — and the people sending them are getting dramatically better at it. Artificial intelligence is giving scammers a powerful new edge, and consumer protection experts say the public needs to understand how the threat has changed.
Brian Watson, a community outreach specialist for the nonprofit ROSE (Resources Outreach to Safeguard the Elderly), works regularly with communities across southern Arizona to educate people about fraud. He spoke with The Show on KJZZ about how AI is reshaping the scam landscape — and what ordinary people can do to protect themselves.
The Biggest Change: Phishing Emails That Actually Look Real
For years, phishing emails — fraudulent messages designed to trick recipients into handing over sensitive information — were relatively easy to spot. Awkward phrasing, broken grammar, and odd sentence structures were common giveaways, often because the messages were written by non-native English speakers operating overseas.
That built-in warning sign is largely gone now. Watson, who also teaches at the University of Arizona, demonstrated the shift firsthand by running a poorly written 2016 phishing email through ChatGPT.
“It was absolutely amazing how much just a few seconds running it through AI cleaned it up to the point where it was actually believable. And this was a poorly written phishing email from 2016.”
The result was a message that read as if it had been written by a fluent, professional English speaker — nearly indistinguishable from legitimate correspondence.
What to Watch for Now
With the old red flags fading, Watson says people need a new mindset. Rather than scanning for spelling errors or strange grammar, he recommends treating any unsolicited email as a potential threat.
“Every email, look at it and say, ‘Could this be a scam?’ Look and see where it came from. Are they asking me for my personal information or my bank account information? Is there a sense of urgency they’re trying to create?”
He also strongly advises against acting on suspicious messages from a smartphone. The small screen makes it harder to catch subtle warning signs. Instead, Watson recommends waiting until you’re at a desktop or laptop computer, where you have more space to carefully examine links, sender addresses, and other details.
“Your smartphone is so, that screen is so small. Wait till you get home, look on a big screen, take your time, and a lot of times you’ll figure out that it is a phishing email.”
AI Makes Scammers More Efficient — Not Just More Convincing
Beyond improving the quality of fraudulent messages, AI is also helping scammers dramatically increase their output. What once required a team of people copying and pasting emails one by one can now be handled automatically at massive scale.
“You can have one person utilizing AI, and that one scammer can send out thousands, if not millions, of phishing emails or wrong number texts. And they just send them out like an army of bad actors.”
Watson describes it as the “E-word” — efficiency. The same technology that helps businesses automate routine tasks is being applied by criminals to flood inboxes and phone numbers with fraudulent messages at a pace that is nearly impossible to keep up with.
Deepfakes and Voice Cloning: A Growing but Labor-Intensive Threat
AI-generated video and audio present another dimension of the problem, though Watson notes these tools are currently more limited in how scammers use them. Voice cloning — where a person’s voice can be replicated from just a sentence or two of audio — has been demonstrated at law enforcement presentations Watson has attended. The technology is striking, but applying it to individual scam attempts requires significant effort.
Where deepfakes are more likely to show up, Watson says, is in romance scams. When a victim demands a video call to verify the identity of someone they’ve been communicating with online, scammers can deploy AI-generated video to make the interaction appear legitimate.
Most romance scammers, he notes, prefer to keep communication limited to text messages or apps — but when pressed for a video call, deepfake technology gives them a way to maintain the deception.
Regulation Has Limits When Scammers Don’t Play by the Rules
As debate continues over whether and how the government should regulate AI, Watson is measured in his expectations. Laws and regulations, he points out, only constrain those who choose to follow them — and scammers, particularly those operating in other countries, have no incentive to comply.
“Whatever rules you put in place and laws, the scammers are not going to obey because they’re scammers by nature, especially if they’re overseas in another country. What happens is a lot of times we set up laws for our companies and the law-abiding companies will follow those policies.”
This dynamic, Watson says, means that consumer awareness will always be the most important line of defense. He draws a parallel to cryptocurrency — a technology with legitimate uses that has also become a tool for criminals seeking anonymity.
Watson is careful to note that most scams still don’t rely heavily on AI. Many phone-based fraud schemes use old-school methods, simply executed with precision. The broader takeaway is that AI has made existing scammers better at what they do — faster, more polished, and harder to detect — rather than creating an entirely new category of threat.
“Every time technology comes around, it’s a cat-and-mouse game with government investigators and criminals, ’cause both sides get the improved technology.”
For more on how technology is reshaping daily life, including whether AI should be allowed to hold a medical license and how massive data centers are sparking community debate in Casa Grande, KJZZ continues to cover the intersection of consumer issues and business. You can also follow related Arizona technology policy coverage and reporting on AI executives and Washington from reporters including Taylor Griffith, Greg Hahne, and Kathy Ritchie. Additional AI and health commentary from Dr. Joseph Sirven is also available in the Science section.
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