Recently, media channels reported that Thai Binh Provincial Police have just dismantled a large-scale, transnational criminal ring, using a new method that has never appeared in Vietnam - which is applying AI to commit illegal acts. According to the authorities, for transactions of VND10 million or more that require biometric scanning, the subjects create AI clips of the account owner's face to pass the bank's biometric authentication security layer, the account owner does not need to directly do it. By the time of the dismantling, there were more than 1 million accounts with a gambling amount of about more than 1,000 billion VND.
Regarding AI technology, in addition to the above offenses, currently with the rapid and strong development of AI technology, many generative AI applications that allow creating videos, images, livestreaming to change voices, change faces... have become increasingly popular, making it difficult for many people to detect.
This also means that AI is creating many big challenges such as: Can convincingly create fake videos, images, sounds, emails, and messages to defame, defraud, or cause social instability. AI analyzes a large amount of data to track and identify individuals without consent, serving bad purposes. AI can automatically create and spread fake news at a dizzying speed and AI itself can also be used to create new malware... affecting public opinion, even national security.
The above reality shows that AI-powered crimes are often more sophisticated, making it difficult to detect and track down culprits. In particular, high-tech crimes, including AI-powered crimes, are often cross-border. More worryingly, the rapid development of technology causes laws and preventive measures to sometimes fail to keep up with the development speed of AI, unintentionally creating loopholes for mining criminals.
There is one thing in common with the scams from the use of AI: exploiting mental weaknesses, psychological manipulation to "set traps" that make victims act hastily without carefully checking authenticity. This reality also creates conditions for AI-related crimes to increase exponentially in recent times, with scams continuously appearing at the level from elementary to sophisticated and complicated.
AI technology has become the right arm of millions of people, so banning AI seems unimaginable in this era. And anyone can become a target, a victim of the attack of a crime using AI technology.
The fact that bad guys take advantage of AI technology to commit illegal acts is a very worrying issue, a serious challenge that our society is facing and will face. Therefore, this is definitely a long-term battle and requires everyone's cooperation. It is necessary to synchronously implement multidimensional solutions to contribute to "defending" this type of crime from taking advantage of AI technology.
On the people's side, it is necessary to raise public awareness of the potential risks from AI abuse, equipping skills to recognize and prevent them. Meanwhile, technology developers and AI businesses also need to have a moral responsibility in designing and implementing technology, preventing the possibility of abuse.
In a management role, managers can use the "old man's stick hits his back" approach by developing AI tools to detect and combat AI overuse. At the same time, authorities also need to build and update strong and flexible legal frameworks to handle new types of crimes related to AI, protect privacy and other basic rights for people. Combining international cooperation, information sharing, experience and action coordination between countries in the field of high-tech and cross-border crime prevention.
It can be said that AI technology itself is a neutral tool, bringing countless positive potentials to humans. However, like any other powerful tool, it can be abused for bad purposes. It is important that we must identify risks early, proactively develop effective prevention and response measures to ensure that AI develops in the direction of serving the common interests of society and minimizing negative impacts.
