Scams on Locodigital

Fake support: when AI hands you the scammer's phone number

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0300

The flight is delayed, the card is blocked, the package vanished. You do what everyone does: type "[company] customer service phone" into a search engine — or, increasingly, ask an AI directly. A number shows up looking official, you call, and on the other end a polite agent fixes everything: they just need you to confirm a few details, the card number, that code that arrived by SMS. Weeks later the statement arrives. The agent was the scammer — and you were the one who dialed.

Can a deepfake beat facial biometrics? How liveness detection works

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0300

Opening an account, approving a large transfer, recovering a password, signing a government contract: at some point over the last few years, your face became the key to all of it. Facial biometrics spread across Brazil because it solves a real problem — a stolen ID document in someone else's hands. But it raises a new and unavoidable question in an era when any face can be synthesized: if AI can fabricate a face on video, can't it fabricate mine in front of the bank? The short answer is "it's much harder than it looks" — and understanding why reveals where the scam actually happens.

Deepfaked celebrities selling investments: why so many people fall for it

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0300

The video has the newsroom desk, the theme music, the face and the voice of an anchor who has been coming into your living room for decades. The "story": an investment platform the government tried to hide, paying out a thousand a day, limited spots. All of it fake — the face, the voice, the report, the platform — and even so it's one of the scams moving the most money in Brazil. Globo has publicly denied deepfakes of its flagship newscast used in the scheme; doctor and TV personality Drauzio Varella did the same over fake videos in which he "recommended" products; worldwide, a synthetic Elon Musk promising to double your crypto has become practically a genre of its own. The honest question isn't "how does anyone fall for this?" — it's "why does this scam work so well?".

AI romance scam: how bots keep the fake love story running

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0300

In 2025, a 53-year-old French woman made headlines around the world when she discovered that the "Brad Pitt" she had been in an online relationship with — and to whom she had transferred more than 800,000 euros for a supposed cancer treatment — was a scammer armed with AI-generated images. The story became a social-media punchline, and that reaction is exactly what keeps the scam alive: while the audience laughs at the victim, the method keeps working, because it doesn't exploit stupidity. It exploits loneliness — and now it has artificial intelligence under the hood.

Deepfake sextortion: what to do if your image is used

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0300

The scam starts with a message: "I have intimate photos of you — pay up or I send them to your whole contact list". The difference today is that the photo may actually exist — without ever having been taken. AI tools generate fake nude images from ordinary social-media pictures, and the extortion built on top of them has a name: deepfake sextortion. The FBI has been warning about the growth of this format since 2023, including against teenagers, and the pattern arrived in Brazil alongside the apps that "undress" photos.

Deepfake candidate: the fake employee scam on video

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0300

The interview was on video, the candidate nailed all four rounds, the résumé checked out, the background check passed. Hired. On day one, the corporate laptop shipped to their home started loading malware — and only then did the company find out the "employee" was a North Korean operative using a stolen identity and an AI-retouched photo. This isn't a TV plot: it happened in 2024 to KnowBe4, a company whose entire business is training people against scams, and which had the honesty to publish the case in detail.

The fake-relative scam with an AI-cloned voice: how it works and how to protect yourself

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 09:00:00 -0300

The phone rings. On the other end, your son's voice, shaking, asking for help: he crashed the car, he's being held, he needs money transferred right now. The voice is identical — the same way of speaking, the same tone. Except it isn't your son. It's a clone generated by artificial intelligence from any random video he posted on social media.

This scam — a variation on the classic virtual kidnapping — has been spreading in 2026, and digital security specialists already treat voice cloning as the new frontier of the phone scam.