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Well it's that time of the new year again where  I talk about some new scams that unfortunately   scammers have come up with to watch out for this  year. I'm ThioJoe and I've got about 10 of them   and some of them are not just new variations on  old scams, but pretty much new scams altogether   thanks to new technology. Real quick before  we jump in, this video isn't sponsored but   it's sponsored by me and I'm going to promote  my hilarious Instagram page. Usually I post   some funny memes and stuff on here as stories  or posts. Should be pretty entertaining or,   of course you can subscribe to this channel.  So let's just jump into it. Starting off with   number one we have so called recovery scams where  scammers actually prey on people who have already   been scammed. And I wanted to mention this one  first because it's one that you'll probably see   in the very comment section of this video. So if  you see comments anywhere not just YouTube but   on Facebook or Instagram saying, "Oh thanks you  so much to this person for recovering my funds!"   Those are also scams don't believe it, just report  them and move on. Next up is one I hadn't seen   before but I guess I'm not surprised, and that  is AI generated product listings. Someone on   Reddit posted about Facebook marketplace listings  for these cat shaped chairs that do look cool   but unfortunately are totally and generated  by AI. Apparently these are usually listed for way   cheaper than what even would make sense like maybe  $50, and unfortunately on the Facebook listings   there was replies by a lot of people who thought  they were real. But it wasn't just chairs, someone   else posted about how they saw on Etsy   crochet patterns for sale. I had to look this one   up to understand but basically I guess if you're  going to crochet pieces of clothing, you typically   use a pattern that you might buy or download  and it tells you how to get a certain look of   a final product. And what the scammers are doing  are basically generating AI images of some cool   looking piece of clothing and saying, "Oh we're  selling you this crochet pattern you buy it and   you'll have the download", but it turns out when  you go to download it, the resulting thing you   create looks absolutely nothing like the image.  It was just made up, and you can see a lot of   reviews people saying just that. So going forward  especially with AI images becoming more and more   realistic, you're just going to have to kind of go  with reputable sellers, reputable websites, read   the reviews and hope they're not reviews and  again it could be literally anything from chairs   to crochet patterns you never know what it's going  to be. Next up number three another scam made   possible thanks to AI are deep celebrity  endorsements for products that are scams. In   this case they've been giveaways for the  cookware brand and I'm going to butcher this name,   Le Creuset and they involve video ads pretending  to be from Gordon Ramsay, Taylor Swift, Selena   Gomez. And at the core of these ads they're like  typical giveaways that say, "Oh go to this   link you'll get a free thing" and you put in your  credit card info, they either steal your money or   your credit card info, or both. But the difference  here is they use voice cloning typically,   to make it sound like the celebrity is actually  talking in the voiceover for these. For the ones   I've seen the videos do include short clips of the  celebrity talking but they don't really sync up,   they look kind of if you look closely and  they're only for a few seconds probably taken   from some random interview. But what's crazy  is these ads are actually still going. I went   on Facebook's Ad Library, which if you're not  aware, you can go on and actually search actively   running ads on Facebook. And I literally searched  "free Le Creuset" and had hundreds of results   of actively running scam ads pretending to be  celebrities like yes Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez,   others. And they all seem to have the same script  they basically say, "Oh due to a packaging error   there's 3,000 sets of cookware that we can't sell  so we're just giving them away." And some of these   have been running for over a week it's wild.  So yes this is an active scam, it's only going   to become more common, I'm surprised Facebook  hasn't done anything about this. I was able to   find hundreds of these on the first search that  I did. Come on Facebook, do better. All right   moving on we have an interesting phone scam that  involves downloading an app, I hadn't seen this   one before. Apparently this scam, at the moment,  has mostly been seen in China but I bet it will   move over here eventually. But basically how it  works is you get a phone call from the scammer,   they pretend to be law enforcement, and say that  "Oh you have some legal case against you you're   going to be arrested", whatever they want to say,  and at some point they direct you to download an   app on your phone. But what's interesting is  not only is the app itself malware of course,   I'll get to that. But they actually give you  a case number that they tell you to type into   the app to look up your case, and it will actually  return a result with legal looking documents. And   they actually will have the names and stuff filled  into the document to make it look a lot more   legitimate. But the main part of the scam is that,  like I said the app itself is malware, and some   way I'm not really sure, the app ends up stealing  your bank account details. Maybe by phishing or if   you have that bank app installed it'll steal from  that, and the scammers end up being able to break   into your bank account and drain your money. But  here's the extra clever thing. That malware app   will actually block incoming calls and texts so  if your bank tries to contact you about the fraud,   they won't be able to contact you at all, and I  wouldn't be surprised if it also redirects text   messages with like verification codes and stuff  to the scammer. Now, in this case the app was   only for Android but I wouldn't be surprised  if we start to see this with iPhone as well,   especially within the European Union, apple is  going to be forced to allow people to    apps outside the App Store. You might see social  engineering where they convince people to    these app files from outside the Google Play  Store, which is what they did in this case,   or outside the iTunes App Store so basically if  you ever get any kind of call in the future where   they try to convince you to download an app, yeah  don't believe that. All right next up number five,   this is kind of like a second part of a scam  I guess you'd call it, where for people who   have had their phone stolen, usually it ends up in  China or some other country where they try to then   sell the phone. However in these places they can  get more money if they can convince you to remove   the iCloud lock on that phone, otherwise they just  have to sell it for parts. So really the scam here   is the part where they try to convince you or  trick you into removing the iCloud lock. These   are real examples someone posted on Reddit. It's  basically a whole saga of escalating threats and   trickery from these scammers. The first thing the  scammers tried was to pretend to be Apple support   saying stuff like, "Oh your phone was jailbroken  and you better remove this because it'll affect   your credit" somehow, and also "It'll affect your  warranty on your new phone" somehow. And of course   they show you instructions on how to remove the  phone, hoping that you'll just go and do it.   When that didn't work they contacted them from  another email address, this time pretending to   be another person and trying to guilt trip them,  and saying "Oh I bought this phone secondhand,   I didn't realize it was stolen", and include a  big sob story about how their daugter is angry at   them, a bunch of nonsense really. And for the next  stage they try to scare you by saying that "All   your info is still on the phone, the erasure that  you did didn't work and they have all your info,   and they're going to sell it as an auction,  and it's going to go to the highest bidder,   and all your info is going to be out there leaked.  Unless of course you remove the lock," they say,   "Then your info will be safe and gone." Of course  more nonsense. But finally when that didn't work   the scammers started sending violent and nasty  threats that I'm probably gonna have to blur out,   but included a video that they probably just  found on the internet, of someone showing a   gun and stuff like that saying "I'm gonna come  to your house and do this and that". Of course   this is all just a script. Someone in the  replies to the reddit post said that they've   literally seen the same exact messages that have  been copy and pasted, sent to other people who   have had their phone stolen, it's all . It's  designed to trick you or scare you so that you'll   eventually remove the iCloud lock so that they can  sell the phone as usable instead of having to sell   it as parts. And apparently the way they get your  contact info is it'll show the Apple ID of the   person who owns the phone I guess. The best thing  to do is simply block the numbers, ignore them,   don't even respond. All right now we're up to  number six, and in the age of lots of online scams   it turns out that physical mail scams are making  a comeback. I've seen at least two examples in the   past year. One was reported on by Brian Krebs a  security researcher who showed how people who own   domains are getting targeted with mail, saying  that you have to pay some registration fee   for your domain or it'll get taken. But of course  it's and they're just hoping that some people   will buy it. And I believe this is mostly for  people who don't have the privacy setting on   their "WHOIS" information it's called. So if you  know what that is, just make sure you use that.   And another very different example in the state of  Tennessee in the US, there were scammers that were   sending out government documents that said  you have to pay some fee for whatever reason. And   the form they used was an actual form, but it was  not for that purpose that they were saying in the   scam, and they just filled in a bunch of bogus  info with some fee. And presumably they have you   either go online or call in and they steal your  credit card or they have you buy gift cards.   Whatever the usual way is after they get you on  the hook. All right on to number seven, this one   was actually interesting, and it turns out that  scammers have been targeting the parents of high   school kids in a phone scam where they call the  household and say that their kid had bought test   prep materials for the ACT and SAT standardized  tests. And they simply say, "Well before we ship   it out we need the payment details can you give us  your email, credit card, stuff like that". And the   parents might just think, "Oh okay I guess they  want to be prepared for the SAT, that's great",   and then give the scammer the info. But to make it  more convincing, the scammers apparently have been   using real info with the actual people's  names that they call, probably from some   stolen database breach that happened, and so they  actually know some info about you, so it makes it   highly targeted and much more believable. But I  bet even if you don't have high school kids they   could adapt this scam to be anything saying your  husband or wife ordered this thing and they need   to pay for it, stuff like that. So always be  diligent and be suspicious if someone randomly   calls you trying to get you to pay for something  you don't remember ordering. Next up, number eight   is the jury duty scam that apparently has been  around for a while but is becoming more popular,   and it's pretty straightforward. Basically a phone  scammer will call you pretending to be the police   or the government and they'll spoof the phone  number to make it look like it's coming from a   police department, and they'll say something like,  "you have a warrant out for your arrest because   you skipped on jury duty and you failed to appear  to the summons", stuff like that. And of course   there's a fine that you can conveniently solve by  just giving your credit card info over the phone,   of course it's just a scam. And they'll give you  the usual threats like if you don't pay you'll   be arrested or you'll have a warrant after your  arrest all sorts of stuff. And again there was   a post on reddit from someone who experienced  this scam and they almost fell for it because   they actually had gotten a jury summons the month  before. So I guess if you call enough people,   then you'll get someone who recently in the past  several months got a jury summons and they might   be more likely to believe it. All right we're up  to number nine, we got a couple more, though I do   have a bonus one at the end. And number nine is a  scam that happens at a gas station they're calling   "pump switching." Apparently how it works is after  you're done pumping your gas, when you're going   to put it away a scammer will walk up to you and  offer to help you out by putting the gas nozzle   back on the thing, or even potentially offering  to pump your gas in the first place. And I guess   somehow they make it seem like when they go to put  the nozzle back they don't actually do it, so that   eventually when you drive away they take the thing  back off the nozzle and then fill up their own   car. And because they didn't put the nozzle back,  it didn't close that credit card transaction,   so that person who drove away now ends up paying  for their gas as well. All right finally up to   number 10, but again I have the bonus one next is  the ozempic scam. If you haven't heard of this,   it's basically a weight loss drug that used to be  for diabetes I think, and there's a shortage of it   I guess. And because it's sold out, scammers took  advantage of it, and apparently scammers put up   a bunch of sites about how you can buy it online  without a prescription and it's cheaper. A pretty   run-of-the-mill scam if you ask me, but the target  in this case is new, it's a new thing that people   have been using, so just be aware of that. All  right now finally this is more of a general thing   so I didn't want to include it in the regular  list. I already talked about ai-generated scams,   and here I just want to emphasize how quickly   AI-generated images are becoming, because even if   you might think they're not really realistic  now, I guarantee you in a year or two they're   going to be indistinguishable. For example  here are images from back in February 2021,   the state of the art at the time, just three  years ago, openAI's DALL-E model. This wasn't   even public but these are some examples they gave  of prompts such as "A kitchen with a fridge stove   and sink" and "a group of animals standing in the  snow". You can kind of tell what it's supposed to   be but I don't think anyone could be using  these to convince someone it's a real image.   But remember that was the state of the art. Here  are some examples from public image generators at   the time and these basically just look like blobs.  However just one year later in April 2022, OpenAI   announced their DALL-E 2 model. This one they did  open up to the public and here are some examples   I created using DALL-E 2 myself. Obviously these  look way better, though you can still tell that   they look weird in a lot of places. Like if  you look closely it's pretty obvious that   these are not real photographs. And at this point  it was able to start generating photos of people,   although again in a lot of places like the eyes it  still looked weird, you could tell that probably   wasn't real. But then only about six months later  in October of 2022, we got Stable Diffusion 1.5,   a public free open source model that you could  download and use on your own computer, and this   did not have any kind of censorship, but of course  it doesn't stop there. Then in 2023 we got a whole   bunch of new models such as Stable Diffusion XL,  MidJourney V5, and DALL-E 3, and these are all   capable of generating convincing photo realistic  images. And the latest models such as DALL-E 3   and MidJourney V6, they can even generate legible  text to some degree. It's only going to get even   better, it's just going to be more and more  realistic, and yes there's even AI generated   video coming down the pipe. Right now they don't  look very realistic, they look kind of janky. But   again it kind of looks like DALL-E 2 or DALL-E  1 level of quality, and we know already what   happened just two to three years later after that.  So going forward you have to be extremely vigilant   about what could be potentially AI generated  images. If you see something totally outrageous   online, maybe take a bit more time to research it  and see if it's actually real. So yeah hopefully   at least going forward you'll now be a little bit  more prepared to know what to look out for. If you   enjoyed this video be sure to definitely give it  a big giant thumbs up for the youtube algorithm,   I'll show you some humorous AI generated images  here. And also consider subscribing, I try to make   videos about twice a week, usually Wednesday  and Saturday. If you want to keep watching,   the next video I'd recommend is last year's  2023 Scams to Watch Out For, because they   haven't stopped using those, they just started  using new additional ones. I'll put that link   right here you can click on. So thanks so much  for watching and I'll see you in the next one.