With AI’s aid, get ready for even slicker scams

I have an email address I don’t use for anything.

It’s attached to my author’s website, and very rarely, I hear from readers or other people trying to reach me who have none of my other email addresses.

Because it’s not connected to any other part of my life, it’s a Venus Flytrap for fraud.

I get a few of the obvious scams all writers get — invitations for my work to be featured at huge book clubs, if I agree to pay an administration fee; notices from fake agents looking to have me hire them; faked letters from false administrators of legitimate literary festivals, offering placements in the roster for cash; web specialists who want to amp up my website — “our work has proven to mean a 20 per cent increase in book sales.”

I often wonder why anyone would try and get money from writers: the vast majority of us are making far less than minimum wage for the hours we invest in trying to get a book into the public’s hands. You’d hardly think even a successful suckering of an author would bring more than pocket change — the average income of a Canadian writer, according to the Writer’s Union of Canada, is less than $10,000 a year.

And still, the offers flow in.

But the beauty of that particular email address is the fact I don’t use it for anything else: it’s not connected to any banking or subscriptions or anything else out in the e-world. It’s just been scraped up by some web-crawler somewhere and added to a list that depends on there being a sucker born every minute.

Because it’s so unused, it means I know pretty much any threat or enticement is guaranteed to be fake.

Just this week, I’ve been offered many enticements, and many threats as well.

“Your case has been settled, and you have received a significant amount of money,” one group of lawyers wrote to me, as a result of the serious harm social media has caused my child.

Well.

I have a free $500 gift card from McDonalds, just by clicking the “claim now” button; Walmart is giving me a free e-bike, once again needing only a simple click of an online button to have the wheels sent my way. TikTok wants to send me a $1,099 mystery box. Click here.

Just $99 means a loss of 40 pounds thanks to appetite-control drugs, an important thing, the email says, with summer “just around the corner.” (In Winnipeg, with it only being October, that’s a very big corner.)

Let alone all the women who have fallen for me after viewing my online profile, and want me to get in touch with them — “Hellooo, You’re the most magnetic person I’ve ever encountered,” one wrote last week. It’s a wonder spoons don’t leap off the table and stick to me, I’m so magnetic — yet I don’t even have an online profile.

Then, there are the threats.

A message from Microsoft saying my account has expired — except the Microsoft account team’s email is to a woman named Leila in Rwanda. A blunt message that “Your account has been blocked! All your photos and videos will be deleted today!” — except the company featuring the cloud storage of my photos has, oddly, no name. Click the button now. Last chance.

My Paramount Plus membership has expired. My SiriusXM account has expired. My Hulu account is going to be removed. It’s my last chance to get a concealed-carry permit for my firearm.

Some are laughably bad. But that’s not the point.

Some of them are just real enough to seem like you should click that button.

Like a picture-perfect, full-art offer from the American Association of Retired People, selecting me for special access to discounted medical insurance and other benefits. (Irony of ironies, the real AARP offers fraud training and protection to older Americans, including web-based frauds.)

Like that very-official looking CRA email, saying that I should download my 2025-26 CRA Benefit Statement, to ensure I obtain all of the benefits that CRA says I’m entitled to.

Just click here.

It’s no wonder people get tricked. I sometimes come close, on other email accounts, even though I’ve had email phishing and fraud training at every one of my last three newspaper jobs. My latest employer not only hired a training company that regularly tries to trick employees into clicking on phishing scams, but even uses internal company information to make the attempts look more legitimate. (Click the wrong thing there, and you don’t lose any money, but you do get thrown back into the training sin bin to take more courses.)

All I’m saying here is that people are going to continue to get tricked by online scams, and that those tricks are going to get better and better. And that’s just the way things are right now.

With AI’s help, the data centres you offer subsidized electricity and near-free water to are also going to be weaponizing fraudsters right back at you. They’ll collect and collate more and more information than anything has before as they build a profile that most closely defines you: your strengths, your weaknesses, the things you think are strengths that actually contain your weakest links. Collation and analysis of masses of data is what AI is best at now, and you can’t even hope to win.

The companies building those AI systems will no doubt claim they bear not one tiny whit of responsibility for the way their technology is going to be misused. Grok AI’s new terms of service notice points out that, effective Oct. 9, 2026, Grok’s owners require users to assume full liability for anything those users prompt Grok to do, from manufacturing faked video and voices to pretty much anything else, absolving Grok’s owners in the process.

The wild, wild west is about to get even wilder. Click here.

Russell Wangersky is a writer and columnist who splits his time between Winnipeg and Adam’s Cove, N.L.