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Generative AI Is Making Running an Online Business a Nightmare

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Sometime last year, Ian Lamont’s inbox began piling up with inquiries about a job listing. The Boston-based owner of a how-to guide company hadn’t opened any new positions, but when he logged onto LinkedIn, he found one for a “Data Entry Clerk” linked to his business’s name and logo.

Lamont soon realized his brand was being scammed, which he confirmed when he came across the profile of someone purporting to be his company’s “manager.” The account had fewer than a dozen connections and an AI-generated face. He spent the next few days warning visitors to his company’s site about the scam and convincing LinkedIn to take down the fake profile and listing. By then, more than twenty people reached out to him directly about the job, and he suspects many more had applied.

Generative AI’s potential to bolster business is staggering. According to one 2023 estimate from McKinsey, in the coming years it’s expected to add more value to the global economy annually than the entire GDP of the United Kingdom. At the same time, GenAI’s ability to almost instantaneously produce authentic-seeming content at mass scale has created the equally staggering potential to harm businesses.

Since ChatGPT’s debut in 2022, online businesses have had to navigate a rapidly expanding deepfake economy, where it’s increasingly difficult to discern whether any text, call, or email is real or a scam. In the past year alone, GenAI-enabled scams have quadrupled, according to the scam reporting platform Chainabuse. In a Nationwide insurance survey of small business owners last fall, a quarter reported having faced at least one AI scam in the past year. Microsoft says it now shuts down nearly 1.6 million bot-based signup attempts every hour. Renée DiResta, who researches online adversarial abuse at Georgetown University, tells me she calls the GenAI boom the “industrial revolution for scams” — as it automates frauds, lowers barriers to entry, reduces costs, and increases access to targets.

The consequences of falling for an AI-manipulated scam can be devastating. Last year, a finance clerk at the engineering firm Arup joined a video call with whom he believed were his colleagues. It turned out that each of the attendees was a deepfake recreation of a real coworker, including the organization’s chief financial officer. The fraudsters asked the clerk to approve overseas transfers amounting to more than $25 million, and assuming the request came through the CFO, he green-lit the transaction.

Business Insider spoke with professionals in several industries — including recruitment, graphic design, publishing, and healthcare — who are scrambling to keep themselves and their customers safe against AI’s ever-evolving threats. Many feel like they’re playing an endless game of whack-a-mole, and the moles are only multiplying and getting more cunning.


Last year, fraudsters used AI to build a French-language replica of the online Japanese knives store Oishya, and sent automated scam offers to the company’s 10,000-plus followers on Instagram. The fake company told customers of the real company they had won a free knife and that all they had to do was pay a small shipping fee to claim it — and nearly 100 people fell for it. Kamila Hankiewicz, who has run Oishya for nine years, learned about the scam only after several victims contacted her asking how long they needed to wait for the parcel to arrive.

It was a rude awakening for Hankiewicz. She’s since ramped up the company’s cybersecurity and now runs campaigns to teach customers how to spot fake communications. Though many of her customers were upset about getting defrauded, Hankiewicz helped them file reports with their financial institutions for refunds. Rattling as the experience was, “the incident actually strengthened our relationship with many customers who appreciated our proactive approach,” she says.

Her alarm bells really went off once the interviewer asked her to share her driver’s license.

Rob Duncan, the VP of strategy at the cybersecurity firm Netcraft, isn’t surprised at the surge in personalized phishing attacks against small businesses like Oishya. GenAI tools now allow even a novice lone wolf with little technical know-how to clone a brand’s image and write flawless, convincing scam messages within minutes, he says. With cheap tools, “attackers can more easily spoof employees, fool customers, or impersonate partners across multiple channels,” Duncan says.

Though mainstream AI tools like ChatGPT have precautions in place when you ask them to infringe copyright, there are now plenty of free or inexpensive online services that allow users to replicate a business’s website with simple text prompts. Using a tool called Llama Press, I was able to produce a near-exact clone of Hankiewicz’s store, and personalize it from a few words of instructions. (Kody Kendall, Llama Press’s founder, says cloning a store like Oshiya’s doesn’t trigger a safety block because there can be legitimate reasons to do so, like when a business owner is trying to migrate their website to a new hosting platform. He adds that Llama Press relies on Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s built-in safety checks to weed out bad-faith requests.)

Text is just one front of the war businesses are fighting against malicious uses of AI. With the latest tools, it takes a solo adversary — again with no technical expertise — as little as an hour to create a convincing fake job candidate to attend a video interview.

Tatiana Becker, a tech recruiter based in New York, tells me deepfake job candidates have become an “epidemic.” Over the past couple years, she has had to frequently reject scam applicants who use deepfake avatars to cheat on interviews. At this point, she’s able to discern some of their telltale signs of fakery, including a glitchy video quality and the candidate’s refusal to switch up any element of their appearance during the call, such as taking off their headphones. Now, at the start of every interview she asks for the candidates’ ID and poses more open-ended questions, like what they like to do in their free time, to suss out if they’re a human. Ironically, she’s made herself more robotic at the outset of interviews to sniff out the robots.

Nicole Yelland, a PR executive, says she found herself on the opposite end of deepfakery earlier this year. A scammer impersonating a startup recruiter approached her over email saying he was looking for a head of comms, with an offer package that included generous pay and benefits. The purported person even shared with her an exhaustive slide deck, decorated with AI-generated visuals, outlining the role’s responsibilities and benefits. Enticed, she scheduled an interview.

During the video meeting, however, the “hiring manager” refused to speak, and instead asked Yelland to type her responses to the written questions in the Microsoft Teams chat section. Her alarm bells really went off once the interviewer started asking her to share a series of private documents, including her driver’s license.

Yelland now runs a background check with tools like Spokeo before engaging with any stranger online. “It’s annoying and takes more time, but engaging with a spammer is more annoying and time-consuming; so this is where we are,” she says.

While videoconferencing platforms like Teams and Zoom are getting better at detecting AI-generated accounts, some experts say the detection itself risks creating an vicious cycle. The data these platforms collect on what’s fake is ultimately used to train more sophisticated GenAI models, which will help them get better at escaping fakery detectors and fuel “an arms race defenders cannot win,” says Jasson Casey, the CEO of Beyond Identity, a cybersecurity firm that specializes in identity theft. Casey and his company believe the focus should instead be on authenticating a person’s identity. Beyond Identity sells tools that can be plugged into Zoom that verify meeting participants through their device’s biometrics and location data. If it detects a discrepancy, the tools label the participants’ video feed as “unverified.” Tramèr Florian, a computer science professor at ETH Zurich, agrees that authenticating identity will likely become more essential to ensure that you’re always talking to a legitimate colleague.

It’s not just fake job candidates entrepreneurs now have to contend with, it’s always fake versions of themselves. In late 2024, scammers ran ads on Facebook for a video featuring Jonathan Shaw, the deputy director of the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne. Although the person in it looked and sounded exactly like Dr. Shaw, the voice had been deepfaked and edited to say that metformin — a first-line treatment for type 2 diabetes — is “dangerous,” and patients should instead switch to an unproven dietary supplement. The fake ad was accompanied by a fake written news interview with Shaw.

Several of his clinic’s patients, believing the video was genuine, reached out asking how to get a hold of the supplement. “One of my longstanding patients asked me how come I continued to prescribe metformin to him, when ‘I’ had said on the video that it was a poor drug,” Shaw tells me. Eventually he was able to get Facebook to take down the video.

Then there’s the equally vexing and annoying issue of AI slop — an inundation of low-quality, mass-produced images and text that is flooding the internet and making it ever-more difficult for the average person to tell what’s real or fake. In her research, DiResta found instances where social platforms’ recommendation engines have promoted malicious slop — where scammers would put up images of items like nonexistent rental properties, appliances, and more that users were frequently falling for it and giving away their payment details.

On Pinterest, AI-generated “inspo” posts have plagued people’s mood boards — so much so that Philadelphia-based Cake Life Shop now often receives orders from customers asking them to recreate what are actually AI-generated cakes. In one shared with Business Insider, the cake resembles a moss-filled rainforest, and features a functional waterfall. Thankfully for cofounder Nima Etemadi, most customers are “receptive to hearing about what is possible with real cake after we burst their AI bubble,” he says.

Similarly, AI-generated books have swarmed Amazon and are now hurting publisher sales.

Pauline Frommer, the president of the travel guide publisher Frommer Media, says that AI-generated guidebooks have managed to reach the top of lists with the help of fake reviews. An AI publisher buys a few Prime memberships, sets the guidebook’s ebook price to zero, and then leaves seemingly “verified reviews” by downloading its copies for free. These practices, she says, “will make it virtually impossible for a new, legitimate brand of guidebook to enter the business right now.” Ian Lamont says he received an AI-generated guidebook as a gift last year: a text-only guide to Taiwan, with no pictures or maps.


While the FTC now considers it illegal to publish fake, AI-generated product reviews, official policies haven’t yet caught up with AI-generated content itself. Platforms like Pinterest and Google have started to watermark and label AI-generated posts, but since it’s not error-free yet, some worry these measures may do more harm than good. DiResta fears that a potential unintended consequence of ubiquitous AI labels would be people experiencing “label fatigue,” where they blindly assume that unlabeled content is therefore always “real.” “It’s a potentially dangerous assumption if a sophisticated manipulator, like a state actor’s intelligence service, manages to get disinformation content past a labeler,” she says.

For now, small business owners should stay vigilant, says Robin Pugh, the executive director of Intelligence for Good, a non-profit that helps victims of internet-enabled crimes. They should always validate they’re dealing with an actual human and that the money they’re sending is actually going where they intend it to go.

Etemadi of Cake Life Shop recognizes that for as much as GenAI can help his business become more efficient, scam artists will ultimately use the same tools to become just as efficient. “Doing business online gets more necessary and high risk every year,” he says. “AI is just part of that.”


Shubham Agarwal is a freelance technology journalist from Ahmedabad, India, whose work has appeared in Wired, The Verge, Fast Company, and more.

Business Insider’s Discourse stories provide perspectives on the day’s most pressing issues, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise.





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UK steel firms on edge as talks to cut Trump tariffs near deadline | Steel industry

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British steelmakers face a nervous wait to discover if they will be hit by US tariffs, after the UK government said it was attempting to complete a deal to protect the industry from Donald Trump’s trade war.

The US has set a 50% tariff on foreign steel and aluminium imports. While the UK has brokered a reduced rate of 25% and is trying to bring it down to zero, a deal has not yet been completed.

On Monday, Downing Street refused to confirm it was confident it could eliminate US tariffs on UK steel before Trump’s deadline on 9 July.

A spokesperson for No 10 said: “Our work with the US continues to get this deal implemented as soon as possible.

“That will remove the 25% tariff on UK steel and aluminium, making us the only country in the world to have tariffs removed on these products.

“The US agreed to remove tariffs on these products as part of our agreement on 8 May. It reiterated that again at the G7 last month. The discussions continue, and will continue to do so.”

The Trump administration has said it will send letters to trading partners without a deal by 9 July. On Monday, Trump caused some confusion over whether tariffs would be implemented by the 9 July deadline, before his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, said tariff rates would take effect on 1 August.

When asked again whether ministers were confident British producers will not be hit by the original 50% tariff, the Downing Street spokesperson said that “discussions continue”.

“We have very close engagement with the US, and the US has been clear that it wants to keep talking to us to get the best deal for businesses and consumers on both sides,” they said.

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Starmer and Trump signed off a UK-US trade deal at the G7 summit in Canada last month. Under the agreement, the UK aerospace sector will face no tariffs at all from the US, while the car industry will have 10% tariffs, down from 25%.

The US executive order implementing the deal highlighted the British steel industry, noting the UK “has committed to working to meet American requirements on the security of the supply chains of steel and aluminium products … and on the nature of ownership of relevant production facilities”.

It likely reflects worries in the US about Jingye Group, which owns British Steel despite the fact that the British government took control of the company in April to stop the closure of its Scunthorpe plant. The Trump administration has sought assurances that China’s Jingye does not use British Steel as a route to circumvent US tariffs.



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Capgemini acquires India-based WNS for $3.3 billion to boost AI business services – Firstpost

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Capgemini expects the deal to be closed by the end of 2025 and be immediately accretive to its revenue and operating margin

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France’s Capgemini has agreed to buy technology outsourcing firm WNS for $3.3 billion in cash to expand the range of AI tools it offers for companies, the IT services group said on Monday.

The deal equips Capgemini to create a consulting business service focused on helping companies improve their processes and cost efficiency with the use of artificial intelligence, namely generative AI and agentic AI, which it expects to attract significant investments.

The purchase price translating to $76.50 per WNS share represents a 17% premium compared to their last closing price on July 3 and does not include WNS’s financial debt, Capgemini said.

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Its interest in India-based WNS, whose services include business process outsourcing and data analytics, was first reported by Reuters in April.

“WNS brings … its high growth, margin accretive and resilient Digital Business Process Services … while further increasing our exposure to the US market,” Capgemini CEO Aiman Ezzat said in a press statement.

WNS’s customers include large organizations such as Coca-Cola, T-Mobile and United Airlines.

On a conference call with media and analysts, Ezzat said the acquisition would immediately create cross-selling opportunities between the two companies, mainly in the U.S. and Britain.

Capgemini expects the deal to be closed by the end of 2025 and be immediately accretive to its revenue and operating margin.

However, its shares fell around 5% following the news, the biggest losers on Europe’s benchmark STOXX 600 index as of 1024 GMT, with Morgan Stanley analysts saying the deal would limit its balance sheet flexibility while not having a major impact on financials.

Some investors are also concerned that Gen AI could impact the typically staff-intensive business process outsourcing (BPO) market, which could bite into Capgemini’s revenues and expose it to new competition, the analysts said in a research note.

“We expect investors to be able to see the opportunity that could come from disrupting BPO with Gen AI but think some evidence will be needed to convince the market WNS is the right vehicle,” they added.

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Business Brief this week: A stampede, a gold rush, and an AI arms race

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Good morning. This week’s AI for Good Summit in Geneva is showing how the technology’s innovations are also pushing global alliances into unfamiliar territory. That’s in focus today – along with this year’s Calgary Stampede and a gold rush that’s obscuring an inconvenient truth about Canada’s exports.

Up first

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On our radar

Tomorrow: Ahead of the July 9 deadline set by Trump for countries to strike trade deals with the U.S., the president said the White House would begin sending letters over the weekend to countries in batches of 10 to notify them of the tariff rates they can expect.

This week: The Calgary Stampede, which opened on Friday and runs through July 13, is known for many things: rodeo, pancakes and denim as far as the eye can see. But its real currency is connection. For 10 days, every bar and rooftop patio in the city is turned into a pop-up boardroom.

This year’s edition lands at an uneasy moment. Alberta’s energy sector has big wins to toast – LNG exports have begun from the West Coast, the long-delayed Trans Mountain pipeline is pumping and Ottawa is suddenly talking about Canada as an “energy superpower.” The city’s mood is buoyant. But a cautious kind of buoyancy, if there can be such a thing: Political uncertainty still looms large, from Mark Carney’s early tenure in Ottawa to the underwhelming response to Alberta’s proposed new pipeline.

On the books: Earnings and economic events are light, but Canada’s recent trade report is a reminder of how hard domestic exporters are being hit as Carney presses for a tariff-free deal with the U.S.


Open this photo in gallery:

Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon on Parliament Hill June 19.PATRICK DOYLE/The Canadian Press

In focus

How global forces have shaped Canada’s priorities

The UN’s AI for Good summit this week is revealing how countries are racing to build sovereign computing infrastructure that is reliant on foreign investment.

In an attempt to capitalize on the economic promise of artificial intelligence, Western governments are investing in domestic data centres, drafting AI rules, and striking deals with countries that, less than a decade ago, might have faced sharper scrutiny.

By turning to investors such as Saudi Arabia, critics warn that attempts to reduce reliance on U.S. tech giants risk entrenching new forms of dependence on states with close ties to China and deeply contested human rights records.

Both Canada and the U.S. have set aside recent ruptures over human rights in favour of strategic and economic interests.

Canada’s 2018 standoff – sparked by then–foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland’s criticism of Saudi Arabia’s arrest of women’s rights activists – formally ended in 2023 when the two governments restored ties on the basis of “mutual respect and common interests.”

For the U.S., Russia’s invasion of Ukraine heightened the need for oil market stability and stronger regional alliances, prompting Washington to re-engage with Riyadh despite earlier condemnations of the kingdom’s role in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. (During his first presidential campaign, Joe Biden pledged to make Saudi Arabia “pay the price” and called the country a “pariah” with “very little social redeeming value.”)

Human-rights advocates have remained critical of the UN for inviting Saudi officials to the AI summit – and concern remains over Riyadh’s expanding ties with China, which include co-operation on data centres, chip development and surveillance technologies that could complicate Western efforts to build secure, independent AI systems.

In May, President Donald Trump signed a US$600-billion strategic agreement with Saudi Arabia, including more than US$40-billion earmarked for artificial intelligence and related infrastructure.

Canada, too, is open to discussions with Saudi Arabia to support domestic data-centre expansion. In a recent interview with The Globe’s Joe Castaldo and Pippa Norman, federal AI minister Evan Solomon said Ottawa is in search of “pockets of capital” to help build sovereign capacity, while insisting any agreements would be pursued with “eyes wide open” and preserve Canadian oversight.

“Diplomatic ties and investment does not mean you agree with governments,” he said. “We can’t look at AI as a walled-off garden. Like, ‘Oh, we cannot ever take money from X or Y.’”

Ottawa’s openness was underscored last week when Castaldo reported that U.S. data-centre firm CoreWeave Inc. will soon operate a site in Cambridge, Ont., with Canadian AI startup Cohere Inc. – backed by $240-million from a federal fund – as a customer.

British-Canadian AI guru Geoffrey Hinton, who is presenting tomorrow, told The Globe he planned on telling Solomon that Canada needs to regulate AI when the two met last week. But he acknowledged a trade-off.

“The big problem is that unless you can get international agreements, countries that don’t regulate will have an advantage over countries that do. That’s the same for exploiting natural resources.”

It’s just one issue for Canada to tackle as it navigates the contradictions of a sovereignty strategy built on foreign capital, no clear regulatory framework and a bit of moral flexibility.


Charted

What the golden shine is hiding

Canada’s trade deficit with the world narrowed in May from a record high the previous month.

But tariffs continued to weigh on exports to the United States – and the rise in prices for gold skewed the picture.

Canada’s trade deficit with the world – in very technical terms according to The Globe’s Jason Kirby, “a measure of how much more stuff we buy from other countries than sell to them” – fell to $5.9-billion in May from a record high of $7.6-billion in April.

But after stripping out imports and exports of the gold category, Kirby observes, Canada’s trade deficit widened to $10.3-billion.


Bookmarked

On our reading list

Bednar: If a toaster burns you, you can sue. But if Big Tech burns you, you’re out of luck.

Keller: Trump has yet to kill the golden goose that is the U.S. economy. But he’s working on it.

Hirsch: To increase defence spending, Canada must cut deeper, tax harder and borrow more – all at once.


Morning update

Stock markets were mixed amid confusion as U.S. officials flagged a delay on tariffs but failed to provide specifics on the changes. Wall Street futures were in negative territory while TSX futures pointed higher.

Overseas, the pan-European STOXX 600 was up 0.34 per cent in morning trading. Britain’s FTSE 100 edged higher 0.13 per cent, Germany’s DAX gained 0.77 per cent and France’s CAC 40 rose 0.25 per cent.

In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei closed 0.56 per cent lower, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng slipped 0.12 per cent.

The Canadian dollar traded at 73.19 U.S. cents.



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