GoKawiilOnline scams are an ever-present threat, costing Americans nearly $119 billion a year. It's not just happening on the internet either. Robocalls and text scams hit a six-year high in 2025.
Now, with the proliferation of artificial intelligence, scammers are even more sophisticated, using AI tools to bypass spam filters and trick people into divulging sensitive information or making false payments.
Attackers can use large language models -- trained to mimic human writing -- to create highly personalized, grammatically flawless phishing emails and texts that convincingly impersonate real individuals. They can also use machine learning to create voice clones, which mimic the pitch, tone and patterns of someone's voice.
As an author with a very public online presence, I’ve received dozens of advanced scams in recent months (over 10 of them while drafting this article), mostly aimed at getting me to purchase nonexistent marketing packages.
Here’s what I’ve learned about identifying scams, especially those that use AI to get past your spam filters.
Common features of AI scams
Technically, it’s impossible to be 100% certain that something was created by AI. Even Pangram, an AI plagiarism checker that claims to outperform human experts at identifying AI-generated content, can produce false positives due to a lack of nuance.
However, there are some red flags to look out for.
Does the message lack unique information?
The most common scam emails I receive are from alleged fans who claim they want to help market my work. After experiencing an initial moment of excitement -- there’s nothing cooler than receiving fan mail -- I realize their email simply rearranges words from one of my book blurbs without any new or unique information. This tells me that the AI model just scraped data from my Goodreads page to build its scam message.
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