Artificial Intelligence is fueling a big increase in online scams.

Head of Security Advisory at BMO Larry Zelvin says as more and more people seek out Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, the number of opportunities to be targeted by scammers increases.

He says fraudsters follow the money, and scams have proliferated dramatically in recent years.

“Some of the statistics that I’ve seen is that holiday-themed phishing attacks increased 300 per cent during Black Friday week. During the latter part of the U.S. Thanksgiving and into Cyber Monday, it’s estimated that 2.6 of all online shopping transactions in Canada were suspected to be fraudulent. That’s an increase of about 51 per cent when compared to a years prior.”

Unfortunately says Zelvin, AI is making scams harder to spot.

“If we would have had this conversation a couple of years ago, I would have told you to watch out for misspellings, or be careful about certain (tenses) that don’t seem right. But now, I’ll tell you, they’re really doing an amazing job of creating fake retail websites, phishing emails and even videos that impersonate trusted individuals or brands.”