Fraud and scams are rampant on today’s Internet. And, scammers are getting better at tricking people into giving up personal information, credentials, and money. In the United States, a Federal Trade Commission report estimates that consumer losses from fraud increased by 30 percent between 2021 and 2022 reaching $8.8 billion. Losses from investment scams increased by 111 percent! Scamio is a new AI tool that promises to help consumers avoid these online frauds. Scamio should be especially useful for non-tech-savvy users who may have difficulty distinguishing legitimate offers and messages from scams.
The global cybersecurity company Bitdefender is behind Scamio. Scamio is similar to the Norton Genie product that Jim Hillier wrote about a few months ago. Scamio is a free web-based service. Scamio is also available as a service for Facebook’s Messenger app with support for WhatsApp and Telegram apps “coming soon”.
One negative to using Scamio is that it requires a Bitdefender account. To keep your privacy, I suggest creating an email alias for the Bitdefender account.
Scamio is a personal scam detection chatbot that works similarly to other AI-powered tools. You interact with the AI using an input field. Scamio accepts three input options: text, a screenshot or image, or a URL.
After entering the potentially suspicious data, Scamio processes the data and returns its verdict on whether it is a scam.
A nice lady named Elizabeth has an overseas account worth $5,000,000 and has generously offered me half of the account if I will assist her in transferring the account. So kind!
However, Scamio informed me that Elizabeth’s generous offer was a scam!
Oh Elizabeth, how could you!
Bottom Line
This new service from Bitdefender provides another option to protect consumers who may have difficulty distinguishing legitimate offers and messages from scams. It is very similar to Norton Genie. Scamio uses AI technology to quickly verify the legitimacy of links, QR codes, messages, and other fraudulent schemes delivered to you via email, text, or instant messaging apps. If you have an offer you are unsure about, you may want to run it through one of these AI fraud scanners. Also, be sure to spread the word about these sites to friends and family who may be susceptible to online fraud.
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This could be helpful but the weakest link in security is always people.
The issue is that people want their security product to protect them but often these people aren’t willing to protect themselves and cyber criminals will always use that to their advantage.
When iCloud had a lot of celebrity breaches apple pushed out 2FA but they denied their system was hacked. We can presume this was probably caused by phishing. 2FA is a great help but not a silver bullet solution. The same people who fell for the original “hacks” could easily fall for phishing attempts claiming to be from Apple saying there is an account issue they need to check but they need to disable their 2FA to allow them in
Did I miss a link for SCAMIO in your article?
Dan
Hi Dan, yes you did. It is in the first paragraph.
I certainly did!
Thanks for your followup,
Dan