Forget the lone hacker in a basement. The biggest AI crime story of 2026 is an industrialized sector.
Taiwan: 57 Indicted, NT$900 Million Stolen
Taipei prosecutors indicted 57 people in one of the largest AI-driven romance scams ever prosecuted. The group, led by a man named Huang and his wife Hsu, defrauded more than 20,000 victims out of at least NT$900 million (US$28.32 million). (https://focustaiwan.tw/society/202609020019)
How? With AI.
The group employed a software engineer named Chung who developed AI voice-changing software that allowed members to impersonate women during phone calls with victims. The operation was divided into teams: “lead generation,” “new customers,” “public relations,” and “returning customers”.
The scam worked like this: victims were lured through dating apps, then passed to chat operators posing as women. They were persuaded to buy products. Then came romantic cultivation. Then requests for gifts — phones, air purifiers, hair dryers. Women from the PR team would meet victims in person for dates, sometimes having sex with them, and collect cash and gifts.
And the management? Monthly review meetings. Performance targets. Punishments for those who failed to meet them — including being electrocuted with fly swatters, sodomized with foreign objects, and coerced into sex acts.
This is not a scam. This is a corporation with HR, KPIs, and cruelty.
Prosecutors are seeking at least 25 years for Huang and 18 years for Hsu.
Greece: €1 Million via AI Voice Clones
On September 19, Greek police arrested two men, aged 23 and 25, who used AI voice cloning to impersonate victims’ relatives in phone calls. The gang allegedly made over €1 million through telephone fraud-.
The approach: you call someone, you sound exactly like their daughter or son, and you say you’re in trouble. The AI cloned the voice from a few seconds of audio found online.
India: The Deepfake of a Chief Minister
On September 12, the Tamil Nadu Crime Branch-CID arrested a man from Rajasthan who created and circulated AI-generated deepfake videos of Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay. The videos, with Hindi audio, asked the public to contact a WhatsApp number for financial help. The scam was used to defraud people in Madhya Pradesh and other states-.
The suspect, Shyabu Khan (28), was arrested with assistance from Rajasthan Police. Mobile phones and electronic devices used in the crime were seized-.
Thailand: AI Faces in Video Calls
Today, September 24, NHK reported that Thai police detained 14 people, including four Japanese nationals, in Bangkok. The group is suspected of using AI to replace faces during video calls to target Japanese people in scams-.
This is the next phase: not just voices, but faces in real-time video conversations. The technology that was science fiction a short time ago is now a standard tool for fraudsters.
What This Means
Europol’s IOCTA 2026 report warned that generative AI tools are increasingly used to tailor social engineering attacks, and that caller ID spoofing and SIM farms enable large-scale fraud-.
The conclusion is unavoidable: if your voice and your face can be stolen with a few seconds of audio and video, what is identity worth anymore?
Laat een reactie achter