Module 7 of StartCloud's AI at Work: Foundations learning pathway, in five short units with a knowledge check: why spelling and grammar no longer reveal a scam, how voice cloning and video deepfakes work in practice, why 'it sounded exactly like him' is no longer evidence, the callback habit that defeats all of them, and what to do the moment one lands at work.
Spotting AI-Generated Scams and Deepfakes
The typo era is over
For twenty years we taught people to spot a scam by its spelling. Dodgy grammar, strange punctuation, a greeting that got your name wrong. It worked, but it was never the scam we were spotting. It was just the part scammers happened to be bad at.
AI has fixed all of it, cheaply and instantly, in fluent Australian English. Scamwatch notes that scammers now use AI to produce thousands of personalised emails, texts and messages built from details found online. So the message that mentions your manager by name, refers to the tender you posted about last week and reads like it came from a real person may well have been written by a machine that has never set foot in Perth.
The old signals are gone. The new signals are about behaviour, not spelling, and they have not changed in decades.
- Spelling mistakes and clumsy grammar. The writing is clean now, and often better than ours
- Obvious translation errors and odd word choices
- "Dear Valued Customer". It has your name, your job title and your last team announcement
- "It looked professional, so it must be real". Looking professional is free
- The ask itself: money, bank details, a password, a code, a gift card, an urgent approval
- Pressure and secrecy: right now, before close of business, do not mention it to anyone yet
- An odd channel: the boss texting from a new number, a supplier suddenly on WhatsApp
- Anything that quietly skips a step your business normally insists on
The most convincing part of a modern scam is usually the detail. They know your manager's name, your accounts email address, the software you use, the conference you went to. All of that sits on your website, your LinkedIn and the ABN register, and AI can assemble it in seconds. Familiarity is now the cheapest thing to fake, so stop treating it as a reason to relax.