AI image scam

Daniel Ryan - 27 November 2023

Recently Facebook has been showing me AI generated fake images in posts from pages that appear to be designed to trick people into thinking the images they post are real. Since I keep interacting with these posts out of skeptical curiosity, I’ve found that there are now plenty of scammy AI posts in my FB feed. It’s clear to me that they are AI-generated, but the worrying part is that many people are being fooled by them.

In particular, there’s a page called “Interesting Thoughts” that shows a total of 20K likes, and most of their posts have thousands of likes and hundreds of comments; other images I’ve seen have hundreds of thousands of likes and thousands of comments.

These posts usually use some heartfelt description, like:

“She’s feeling sad 🥲[sad face emoji] because nobody appreciates her hardwork.” or “six-year-old Anna, who lived in Manhattan, drew a wolf so clearly and beautifully that no one believed their eyes Amazing work 👏[clap emoji] let’s appreciate it” or “My son made this with his own hands 🙌[hands above head in celebration emoji] They told they wouldn’t get a like. Is that true!!!”.

Many of these same images are shared across multiple different Facebook pages, which may be a case of plagiarism, or maybe a coordinated effort to dupe people.

Looking at the comments, plenty of “boomers” are convinced it’s real. At first I questioned if these people’s profiles were real, as there was a chance they were also fake, and being used to bolster like counts - but examining them showed they were old accounts, and they didn’t look like they were hacked (but it’s always hard to say when the hackers delete comments).

I messaged Linda Mahan, warning her that she was being fooled by an AI image, but received no reply.

This particular post has a link, but their website is broken; it shows the image and nothing more. I suspect there might be a scamming angle added there at some point in the future. Looking at the website’s WhoIs data, “asweetstoriess.pages.dev” is listed as a Cloudflare service. I’ve sent a report to Cloudflare about the whole situation, so we’ll see if they take any action.

Reading through more of these comments, I’ve found a spammer’s profile that replies to many of them and tries to get people to send a friend request to the scammer. Presumably asking for friend requests rather than sending out requests protects the scam account from being blocked by Facebook for suspicious activity.

These scam accounts are fake profiles with very little info. This one above, for example, was probably copied from a real profile.

In fact my wife Lisa has seen this profile image before, noting the “widowed” relationship status; she said she often used to get messages saying things like “You have a beautiful smile, I would like to get to know you…”, and other similar messages proclaiming the start of a friendship or relationship.

But there’s some good news: I do occasionally see some people trying to fight back and posting this warning image to various scam posts:

It’s worth noting that the scamming comments likely have nothing to do with the page hosting the fake images, as these kinds of scam comments asking people for friend requests are everywhere on Facebook.

I suspect the pages may be trying to grow the amount of likes their page has so that they can later sell the page and the new owner can repurpose it with a new name and new posts, while keeping the likes that have already been harvested. Facebook needs to do more to stop this.

To be honest I’m not sure what’s worse - the pages that are fooling people with AI images, or the many flat-earthers I’ve seen commenting on anything space-related and yelling “CGI”. I’ve reported some of these pages as scams to Facebook, but it’s unlikely they will do anything about it - like most of my reports, it’ll probably just disappear into the black hole of Facebook’s reporting machinery. If not enough people report something, the threshold for action isn’t reached, nothing is done, and the scam continues…

Whether you like AI or not, it’s not going away. So these things are probably only going to get worse for a while. My position on new technology is that we need to be quick on regulation to help reduce harm and allow the positives to flow. Many countries are working on the issue, so we might see some action to help at some point.