Yahoo Finance Social Security Alert: Official Sounds Alarm Against AI, Warning It Will Make Fraud ‘Easier and Faster To Execute’
Social Security fraud is nothing new — it’s been going on for decades — but the tools used to commit it are ever-changing. The latest tool, artificial intelligence, might be the most powerful yet, and Social Security Administration officials are sounding the alarm about its potential impact.
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In a briefing with U.S. House members last month, Anthony Monaco of the SSA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) said AI is “quickly becoming a primary driver of emerging technologies and is impacting society in ways that everyone throughout the public and private sector are just beginning to understand.”
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To drive his point home, Monaco referenced recent comments SSA Inspector General Gail Ennis made in a memo to Acting SSA Commissioner Dr. Kilolo Kijakazi regarding how the SSA and OIG can battle AI fraud.
Among other things, Ennis wrote that “criminals will use AI to make fraudulent schemes easier and faster to execute, the deceptions more credible and realistic, and the fraud more profitable. The OIG is in the early stages of understanding how criminals will leverage AI to commit fraud against SSA.”
As the SSA noted in a July 25 press release, a recent SSA OIG investigation found that an AI powered chatbot was used to impersonate Social Security beneficiaries and contact customer service representatives to “divert monthly benefit payments to spurious accounts.”
As with other government impersonation scams, the chatbot numbers originated from overseas. In this case, the chatbots “were effective” in moving stolen Social Security benefits into the stream of U.S. criminal commerce, where organized rings of “money mules” collected and moved the stolen money.
In response, Ennis established an internal Task Force to study AI and related technology. One goal is to determine the tools, processes and staffing needed to investigate and deter AI-related fraud.
AI fraud isn’t limited to chatbots attempting to scam the SSA. As CNBC reported, a fake but otherwise realistic-looking video of President Joe Biden recently made the rounds urging people to sign up for extra Social Security benefits. This was an example of how AI can prey upon beneficiaries by asking victims to divulge personal information with the promise of extra money.
“We’re in this world where everything looks legitimate, but we can’t trust anything,” Kathy Stokes, director of fraud prevention at AARP’s Fraud Watch Network, told CNBC.
The SSA’s efforts to get its arms around the problem follow the usual pattern of government fraud prevention — meaning it’s already behind the curve, according to Haywood Talcove, CEO of the government business of LexisNexis Risk Solutions.
“You don’t have years, months or weeks to study this, because it is here right now,” Talcove told CNBC.
Compounding the problem is a lack of funding at the SSA, which has impacted everything from customer service to fraud prevention. Battling AI fraud will require great sums of money that the SSA doesn’t necessarily have right now, experts say.
“It’s going to have to be expensive and it’s going to have to be an ongoing effort. They need money to be able to deal with it,” Maria Freese, senior legislative representative at the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, told CNBC.
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