Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall, author of the instant bestseller, CODE RED, warns that AI has lowered the barrier for sophisticated scams, making deepfake frauds powered by AI easier than ever.
“What we’re seeing is that AI is driving the cost of deception towards zero,” Hall told Wake Up America on Newsmax . “So a scammer can now create a believable fake identity in just about an hour.”
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Even Jason Rebholz, who runs a cyber security firm focused on AI-driven threats, was almost duped by an AI scammer, Newsmax reported.
Rebholz said he had conducted a job interview with a candidate earlier this year, when he felt something was off.
“The thing that really stood out to me was the face was just very soft, very blurry looking around the edges. I start thinking, ‘I think this might be a deep fake,’” Rebholz said.
After calling a friend who specializes in deep fake detection, he learned that the applicant was not real, Newsmax reported.
The outlet cited a Missouri mother who received a horrifying phone call last summer that involved a scammer claiming to be her daughter, saying she had been kidnapped and needed ransom money to be set free.
“It’s my child. I know my child’s voice, and it sounded exactly like my child’s voice that I’ve heard every day of my life,” the mother said of her experience speaking with the fraudster over the phone.
The voice, however, was an AI-generated impersonator — a fact that the mother didn’t realize until her actual daughter got in contact with her.
Hall told Newsmax that psychological manipulation has become one of the signature moves of today’s AI scammers.
“They can now mine your social media and then they build a detailed dossier on your life, and then they use the AI to mimic a loved one so convincingly that your instincts will tell you that it’s real,” the author said.
“These tools are now becoming democratized so that they’re cheap, they’re easy to use, and that means they’re accessible at a mass scale,” Hall added.
AI-related scams accounted for more than 22,000 complaints in 2025, and nearly $893 million in losses, according to the FBI.
In some cases, the threat is coming from overseas, Newsmax noted, citing bad actors using face swap technology to infiltrate U.S. companies, and also using the technology to clone voices so they can trick families into believing a loved one is in danger.
To learn more about how to protect yourself and your family from AI fraudsters — among other topics involving the technology — check out Hall’s new book, Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI.
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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