AI Scammers Are Better at Building Trust Than Humans
But can AI fully replace a human scammer, autonomously building the web of deception leading up to the fake investment that defrauds the mark? Nearly half of the test subjects fulfilled that request for the AI chatbot, while fewer than one in five took the bait when talking to a human. Then by transitioning it over to the human scammer at the end, this completely bypasses any vendor safeguards,” says Yisroel Mirsky, a computer science professor at Ben Gurion University of the Negev focused on AI security.
- ▪But can AI fully replace a human scammer, autonomously building the web of deception leading up to the fake investment that defrauds the mark?
- ▪Nearly half of the test subjects fulfilled that request for the AI chatbot, while fewer than one in five took the bait when talking to a human.
- ▪Then by transitioning it over to the human scammer at the end, this completely bypasses any vendor safeguards,” says Yisroel Mirsky, a computer science professor at Ben Gurion University of the Negev focused on AI security.
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| Original publisher | WIRED — Security |
| Canonical URL | https://www.wired.com/story/ai-scammers-are-better-at-building-trust-than-humans/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 30 Jul 2026 09:30:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-30T09:32:01.530Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-30T09:32:01.530Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 6rBTihGQZ6jw · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Andy GreenbergSecurityJul 30, 2026 5:30 AMAI Scammers Are Better at Building Trust Than HumansResearchers pitted a person against a Claude agent and found that, after a week of texting, the AI chatbot was more effective at creating “exploitable trust” with others.Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty ImagesCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyThe notion that scammers can use AI to sharpen their deceptions, polish their language, and lubricate their banter with victims is now a reality for anyone fighting the fraud operations that steal tens of billions of dollars a year worldwide.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at WIRED — Security.
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