AI makes it easier to code websites — including ones that scam consumers
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How is AI changing the landscape of website creation?
With AI, it's easy to whip up scam websites, really good looking ones. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.
Thanks to AI coding agents, basically anyone can program their own software without much technical knowledge. You want to build yourself a website? Just tell your AI coding agent what you want and voila. But lowering the barrier to sophisticated web design is also opening the door to more scams. Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino has more.
The other night, I'm sort of half watching a spy thriller on Hulu and shopping on my phone for a hair care product. If you must know, it was the curl moisturizing mousse from the Italian luxury brand Davines. 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.
Truly, I empathize so much with people like yourself who find these threats in the wild and assume that they are legitimate.
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.
We can see the basic hallmarks of AI generation that you might see repeated in the code. We're even watching to see how many emojis are left into the site code because that's not something people typically do.
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.
It's the same scam. It's just it's cheaper to do it on a broader scale.
We'll be right back. You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes. We're back with Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino.
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.
And that means the return on investment is higher. That means it's going to be more prolific.
Smaller brands and e-commerce operations are now being targeted by imposters, says Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at Silent Push.
You're a luxury hair brand. You've never had any cyber threats targeting you. And then suddenly you get dozens of customers who are like, I lost $1,000. And so a lot of these brands are facing this challenge of how do I find these? How do I warn my customers that this could exist?
What personal experience highlights the risks of AI-generated scam websites?
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.
Imagine you're on a social network and you've liked a luxury brand. A scammer can buy ads targeting people who have liked that luxury brand. You Googled it. It was on the first page of results. How could it be bad?
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.
The more and more that AI becomes like infrastructural and become part of our everyday lives, the more likely we are to encounter issues scams and fraud.
Whether it's deepfake videos, job scams, or imposter websites, AI is scrambling the signals we use to make sense of the world.
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