Megan McCarty Carino

Being the savvy consumer I am, I know you can sometimes end up with counterfeit beauty products, so I head over to Google to find something trustworthy.

First sponsored result?

The Davines North America official online shop.

Spoiler, it was not.

That's Ginny Spicer, a threat intelligence analyst at cybersecurity firm Netcraft, which says last year it identified 100,000 AI-generated websites impersonating almost 200 different brands.

But on the front end, my fake Davines website looked nearly identical to the real thing, at least on a mobile phone.

No misspellings or janky graphics.

It's not that I didn't know that sophisticated scam websites exist.

They've been around a while.

I guess I just wasn't expecting to encounter one in a Google search for a niche Italian hair product.

Charles Henderson with cybersecurity firm CoalFire says AI has changed the economics of scamming.

In the old days, my Davines scammer would either have had to learn specialized skills or hire someone with them, spend a bunch of time building a site, and then hope enough shoppers of a relatively obscure brand handed over their credit card numbers in the short window of time before the scam inevitably got reported.

But AI makes it possible to generate dozens of official-looking sites a day with just a few prompts.

Smaller brands and e-commerce operations are now being targeted by imposters, says Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at Silent Push.

He says because fake sites are cheaper to produce, scammers don't have to be so aggressive in finding victims with unsolicited emails or text, which many consumers have grown skeptical of.

He says the usual red flags apply, like discounts that are too good to be true, but we now have to be vigilant in contexts we might not have expected.

And we've got all kinds of AI agents out there doing who knows what, says Lana Swartz, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia.

Whether it's deepfake videos, job scams, or imposter websites, AI is scrambling the signals we use to make sense of the world.

I did finally realize the Davines site was fake.

About half a second before I hit the buy button, I glanced down at the URL, which said Davines.com.