Using AI generated images to get refunds

https://www.wired.com/story/scammers-in-china-are-using-ai-generated-images-to-get-refunds/

by MattSayar • 7 months ago

80 100 7 months ago

maelito• 7 months ago

We absolutely need certified no-AI digital proofs.

We absolutely also need full and complete peace on earth and no more wars, but what we need isn't always what is feasible to get in real life. "No-AI proofs" falls into that bucket of "Would be nice to have, but very infeasible to actually create".

exe344• 7 months ago

it will be implemented by chips-on-camera, that will tie you to a picture. it will be pushed forward by law enforcement ("think of the children!") and it will be great for profits. not so much for privacy.

frenzcan• 7 months ago

This seems like such a tricky problem. There was a no-ai camera posted here recently which verified the photos were genuinely taken on the device. It was pointed out someone could photograph an ai image via the camera to produce a verified image.

Maybe it needs to be similar to SSL certificates where trusted authorities can verify and revoke verification for digital assets.

stanac• 7 months ago

I was thinking the same thing. Apple and Google can start (as tech companies) to add signatures to images. As long as private key doesn't leak we are good. And each manufacturer can have different cert issued by higher authority e.g. Google, so it can be revoked when it leaks. They could include digital camera manufacturers (sony, nicon, canon, ...) and define a standard. Signature can be a meta tag based on hash of the image.

This would limit authenticity to images taken by official software.

intended9• 7 months ago

Wouldn’t it end up being some form of nuisance proof? Introducing friction to create verification check points or examine and establish the chain of evidence?

But that will only matter for highly legal things or important things. Everything else will be too much of a bother to follow information hygiene.

It’s like we’ve introduced an information weed, whose only goal is to create content that matches our dopamine receptors. Maybe our instincts will shift to assuming any shiny or eye catching content is fruit of the weed? Designed to attract us?

orbital-decay• 7 months ago

Of course. I already imagine an end-to-end hardware DRM pipeline where images can only be modified with the software made by "trusted" certified parties. Mandated by law and tied to your real ID, of course. Analog loophole can be dealt with later, first things first. /s

konfusinomicon• 7 months ago

back to the blockchain!

risyachka• 7 months ago

And again, few will ruin it for all of us.

websiteapi7• 7 months ago

Eventually the concept of refunds will become very rare. In fact, it, along with free shipping were pretty rare before Amazon and Walmart.

If you travel and go to some random beach town and buy random item from random street merchant, they won’t give you a refund. Main issue to bridge is ensuring the item is expected as you can’t physically inspect prior to purchase.

It’ll be interesting to see how that’s solved. I participate in kickstarter which defacto doesn’t really offer refunds, so maybe it’ll be the same.

gyomu• 7 months ago

Eventually the concept of refunds will become very rare

Except where enshrined by law, eg in the EU

websiteapi7• 7 months ago

laws can change - eventually this scam described in the article will be ubiquitous and unavoidable.

embedding-shape5• 7 months ago

If you travel and go to some random beach town and buy random item from random street merchant, they won’t give you a refund. Main issue to bridge is ensuring the item is expected as you can’t physically inspect prior to purchase.

Depends on how large the beach town is, and what country. Whenever I've needed to return/change things in those type of places (in South America, South Europe and around East Asia), it's never been a problem even if I don't have a receipt, as usually the vendor recognize you, or the person who sold it to you is around somewhere.

I can remember one clear time (probably out of 10s) where someone refused to take back an item that clearly didn't work the way it was sold to us.

mcphage3• 7 months ago

Eventually the concept of refunds will become very rare.

I don’t think so—it makes the risk of purchase too high, and people will buy less. Which is not what the sellers want.

it, along with free shipping were pretty rare before Amazon and Walmart.

Refunds were not rare before Walmart and Amazon.

harvey92• 7 months ago

Refund-without-return is what might fade out. I've had that with low value things like a lightbulb that had the wrong fitting.

websiteapi7• 7 months ago

free shipping even for returns were indeed rare, thus a refund was not free, nor complete

isoprophlex• 7 months ago

Maybe the extreme scalability of AI bullshitting will offset the extreme scalability of running large-scale direct-to-consumer oligopolies, and we see some return to local shopping, with all the positive effects on local communities... one can hope

kaffekaka• 7 months ago

I want you to be right, but that requires quite a lot of hope.

eru6• 7 months ago

Division of labour is a good thing. It's why we are rich today.

sweezyjeezy• 7 months ago

That's a stretch. One can hold the view that division of labour is a useful economical principle, but also that oligopolies represent a dangerous concentration of power.

only-one17012• 7 months ago

Well, it’s either a that, or we took a bunch of resources from all over the world by force. Maybe a bit of both?

blibble• 7 months ago

where "we" is bezos

meanwhile my local highstreet is essentially dead

fosco• 7 months ago

Local stores bullshit too, I was at a well known American ‘sporting goods’ store and got an exercise ball of 75cm size (it states on box), it is fully pumped and smaller than a 55cm ball that I have. When purchasing online I’ve had better luck

Caveat emptor

dorfsmay• 7 months ago

Did you measure them?

Did you return the one you bought locally?

mauvehaus• 7 months ago

Just so we're clear: are you having an issue with the size of the balls at Dicks[0]?

[0] https://www.dickssportinggoods.com/

mensetmanusman2• 7 months ago

All we know is that we have no idea what the consequences are going to be after this plays out.

pembrook• 7 months ago

What positive effects?

More suburban strip malls, more fluorescent lighting, more people working mindless do nothing retail jobs for minimum wage, higher prices due to zero economies of scale, inefficiency from every local store reinventing the wheel of staffing/recruiting/scheduling/warehouseing/anti-theft/POS/advertising/etc.

If online shops have to raise prices to combat fraud it doesn’t suddenly turn springfield Ohio into the Zurich city center.

supriyo-biswas2• 7 months ago

The way I see it, generative AI has been introducing a lot of distrust into systems that worked "fine" previously, such as rendering homework ineffective in the case of education, making verification difficult for remote interviewing, flooding the internet with low-quality noise (aka slop) that makes it difficult for reputable and researched sources of information to stand out, with all the implications it has for society, the fraudulent returns described here, and the like.

Ultimately, it would be a bit ironic if generative AI ends up kneecaping itself, either through regulation (because businesses and governments will be unlikely to tolerate hiring fraud, returns fraud etc. beyond a threshold), or caused things to move into meatspace through on-site interviews, reliance on physical stores, elimination of online courses and others, which is less amenable to its application.

thunky4• 7 months ago

rendering homework ineffective

Homework isn't any more ineffective imo. The way we educate and grade is.

Imagine if people went to school to learn something rather than to "level up". And you earned a job based on what you know, or what you can do, rather than what degree you banked.

Then maybe you would want to do the homework.

If gen AI helps us flip the current system on it's head that would be a good thing.

supriyo-biswas2• 7 months ago

And you earned a job based on what you know, or what you can do, rather than what degree you banked

As I see it, companies will want some sort of artifact that tells them that the person has some basic knowledge in their field of study, which would make us come back to the same system that many detest.

Otherwise we'll just end up with Samsung Korea's version of the entrance test[1] which is like the SAT but for getting a job, which only a handful of companies can realistically do, and as such there is very little appetite for it in the "West".

[1] https://www.graduatesfirst.com/samsung-aptitude-tests

intended9• 7 months ago

No one is willing to pay for this. Bloom’s 2 sigma problem is from 1984.

MOOCs were the hope for education but that didn’t take off either. Now any remote learning will need physical examinations, which make certification pathways for everything more expensive.

Even if you want to study, our distractions are crafted by people who spend hours figuring out the right dopamine reward schedules to keep you distracted.

avereveard8• 7 months ago

every time I dig in this story is always stories of stories, and all walk backward to maybe one single merchant, which is just his word, with no police trail or court case trail or anything substantial, with news agency work over "examples and reconstruction of what might have happened" and no actual data that could be verified / falsified.

is this something anyone has actually seen happen, or is it part of the AI hype cycle?

websiteapi7• 7 months ago

scamming to get refunds has always been a thing.

avereveard8• 7 months ago

and that say nothing whether this is actually happening or not, what's your point?

pixiemaster• 7 months ago

I was consulting for an insurance company once. they even had examples of some of their employees to get insurance money for broken things, using their internal example pictures….

PunchyHamster• 7 months ago

well, now that it hit the news it will happen more often!

avereveard8• 7 months ago

maybe, but this story is circulating for a while now even on mainstream media, and I still haven't seen shops names, no order IDs, no platform statements, nothing that can be independently verified yet. just "people say". sure if this is such a big problem we'd have some proof to go by by now.

intended9• 7 months ago

I’ve heard that this was happening with food apps in India. I am waiting for when people realize how to fake prescriptions.

pixl972• 7 months ago

I mean a lot of US states use an electronic system where the doctor submits them directly. Are there still many printed prescriptions?

driverdan• 7 months ago

I am waiting for when people realize how to fake prescriptions

How would an LLM help with that? Paper prescriptions can be copied using Word and a pen.

TrackerFF• 7 months ago

Seems easy enough to fix, by requiring the customer to bring back to purchased item. I mean, that's how it still works in the real world, at least where I live - if I purchase something from the grocery store, which turns out to be spoiled, I'll take the item back and get a refund.

intended9• 7 months ago

There is always a Fix to a problem. Fixes for fraud will always impact the majority who don’t use fraudulent techniques.

The cost of the Fix is the issue.

That’s resources that need to be spent to combat a type of fraud that was impossible at scale 4 years ago.

atonse• 7 months ago

Isn’t this easy to fix over time? Like ok, you issue one refund. But if Amazon sees the same users requesting too many refunds then it is a red flag?

lm28469• 7 months ago

I've been rotating a few amazon accounts for a decade to be in almost continuous free prime, they don't give a shit yet

harvey92• 7 months ago

This is a somewhat useful filter for actual consumers but here we are also looking at large scale fraud. The article mentions opponents using rotating IP addresses and high volumes of refund requests to try to overwhelm counter-fraud measures.

KellyCriterion• 7 months ago

During the dotcom-boom, I worked for SME IT shop;

Sometimes we asked for refund some stuff and my boss told me: "dont deliver them the original hardware, pick a cheap one from the stock and put it in the box"

This worked very often without any questions, so we just could keep the good stuff :-D

utopiah• 7 months ago

Ah finally some positive use of GenAI! Wait no, still not... /s

intended9• 7 months ago

GenAI really is underscoring how much of society is about veracity.

I’d say the fears and defenses we had in place for speech online, are having their foundations ripped out from under them.

Most of the concern used to be about government control, and that more speech would be the way to democratize and expand our agency over our lives.

However now, especially with generative AI and LLMs, the primary vector to control the market place of ideas is to overwhelm the market.

Reduce the cost to make content, sandblast our receptors, create too many things to spend our collective energy on verifying, and the outcomes are the same as controlling what is thought and discussed.

ChrisMarshallNY• 7 months ago

Plus, even with supposed confirmation from a chatbot, ecommerce platforms won’t necessarily always side with the seller.

Amazon is pretty notorious for shipping almost all of the risk onto the seller. I suspect that's the norm, these days, for most platforms.

grumbel• 7 months ago

That's something C2PA[1] might be able to help with, i.e. your phones camera puts a digital signature on the photo confirming that your phone took it. If that doesn't work out due to people photographing an AI image of a display, I would expect custom shop apps to be required to make warranty claims, as they could make use of all the phones sensors and make forging much harder.

Either way, I am not sure how big of a problem this is to begin with, since you'd leave quite the paper trail either way. It's not a stunt you can pull off repeatedly without getting caught.

[1] https://c2pa.org/

mensetmanusman2• 7 months ago

Good idea. It’s a type of image that doesn't need to be modified, so an encoding verification scheme would work.

mschuster91• 7 months ago

C2PA only holds up until someone can extract the key material from any cheap-ass sensor.

bgbntty22• 7 months ago

An easy solution - open the package when the delivery person comes or when you pick it up from the delivery office. The delivery person can take a photo and act as a witness. If you take the package from the local delivery office, there are cameras and staff, so I can't just swap a ripe apple for a rotten one.

Where I live we don't have the habit of just putting the delivery on the porch for a few reasons. First, it's ridiculous if you think about it - no one signed for it, so how could you mark it as delivered? I don't get the US in that regard. Secondly, most of the houses have fences, so the delivery person can't come to the house even if they wanted to. You're basically required to meet the delivery person.

gruez2• 7 months ago

An easy solution - open the package when the delivery person comes

That would massively slow down delivery times, especially if the packaging is non-trivial to open/inspect. Not to mention that not everyone works a comfy remote job where they're at the door the entire day.

bgbntty22• 7 months ago

I'm at home most of the time, yet I prefer to go to the delivery office to pick up my packages. It's a 5 minute walk, as they're all over the city. Might not work well for big car-first American cities, though. I prefer going to the delivery office because I hate waiting for a delivery person to show up and wondering if I have time to go to the bathroom or not.

But I agree that not everything is easy to inspect. Most things seem to be, though. Another issue is not wanting third parties from seeing what you've purchased.

kodyo• 7 months ago

The honor system is a remnant of a high-trust society. Living in a place where you can generally trust your neighbors is neat.

Using AI generated images to get refunds

Related Stories