Description: A real estate scam is reported to have used AI-generated phishing emails to impersonate a title company lawyer, tricking homebuyer Raegan Bartlo into wiring $255,000 to a fraudulent account. The emails were alleged to be convincing, with no grammatical errors or tone issues. Bartlo recovered part of the funds but lost $112,000.
Editor Notes: See also: Incident 858: Deepfake Reportedly Used in Attempted Real Estate Fraud in Hallandale Beach, Florida.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Unknown generative AI tools creators developed an AI system deployed by scammers and Fraudsters, which harmed Real estate market , Raegan Bartlo and Financial institutions.
Implicated AI system: Unnamed generative AI tools
Incident Stats
Incident ID
864
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2024-08-23
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
washingtonpost.com · 2024
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
The closing date was approaching on Raegan Bartlo's new home in West Virginia, so she wasn't surprised to receive an email on Aug. 23 that appeared to be from the title company lawyer with instructions to wire a $255,000 down payment.
She s…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
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