La Jornada: Warning issued about AI scams for this back-to-school season

Millions of families are still enjoying summer vacation, but for many parents, the back-to-school season has already begun.

Cinthia and Adrián have four children: two in high school, one in elementary school, and the youngest in kindergarten. This year, they’ll spend a little over 14,300 pesos on school supplies, clothes, backpacks, and any treats their kids might want.

“Everything is more expensive. Last year, the elementary school supply list cost me a little over 700 pesos; today it’s almost 1,000 pesos… Yes, it’s a lot, but what can we do?” says Cinthia.

To get everything on the lists, she goes to stationery stores, supermarkets, and wholesale stores. Between purchases, she also receives messages offering loans to help ease the expenses. One problem is that these messages aren’t from the financial institution where she has a bank account.

She also receives offers for “magical jobs to make the back-to-school transition easier,” which pay well “in a short amount of time.”

Beware of messages: A recent alert from the New York State Department of Education indicates that back-to-school shopping represents the second largest expense of the year for families, with them spending almost as much as during the Christmas season.

Therefore, this August, not only are cybercriminals targeting parents, but so is artificial intelligence (AI), which is used to create thousands of fake messages, ads, and websites capable of deceiving even the most experienced users.

Behind many of the most attractive offers to save on school supplies, tuition, or scholarships, increasingly sophisticated digital fraud may be lurking, warn experts.

Scammers do their homework

Just a few years ago, an email with spelling mistakes or a poorly written text message was enough to raise suspicions of fraud, but today those differences have practically disappeared.

David González, a cybersecurity researcher at ESET, stated that AI has significantly reduced the time and cost of developing a convincing scam.

“Today, a cybercriminal can create emails, fake websites, and personalized messages in minutes—things that previously required technical expertise or considerable preparation time.

“AI enhances social engineering by cloning voices, creating fake videos, and crafting messages perfectly tailored to the victim’s profile. This means that a parent could receive a call seemingly from a school, an educational institution, or even someone they know, when in reality it’s a scam perpetrated using this technology.”

The most worrying aspect, the expert considered, is that these capabilities are no longer reserved for highly sophisticated groups, as AI tools are becoming increasingly accessible, allowing more malicious actors to participate in these types of frauds during this time of year.

Convince, Don’t Hack

Gastón Huerta, director of fraud prevention at Banamex, explained that attackers are increasingly resorting to the art of deception to defraud their clients.

“Through social engineering, they try to get the victim to provide information such as their access codes to their banking services in order to take control of their accounts, or they try to get the user to carry out instructions given by the scammer and transfer their funds to an account, supposedly for protection.

“We have also seen that on certain social networks, investment schemes are advertised this season, with wonderful returns that many people fall for and hand over their money,” he points out.

The Toughest Test

The test is complicated for parents to distinguish between a legitimate offer and a scam.

“The most concerning scams are fake online stores, messages impersonating schools or educational institutions, and bogus offers of scholarships, grants, or student funding… The rise in scams related to online deliveries and purchases is also worrying,” said David González of ESET.

“The evidence points to a sustained increase in these threats because cybercriminals are using automation and artificial intelligence to quickly create fraudulent websites, fake ads, and massive social engineering campaigns,” the researcher added.