AI scammers target missing man's parents with chilling extortion attempt

Extortionists have sent the parents of a missing West Australian man an AI-generated image of their son and demanded thousands of dollars in exchange for his safety.

Rakoia Battensoli, who has autism, was missing for about two weeks before his mother, Montina Delamere, pleaded for members of the public to look out for her son in a social media post on Monday.

In the hours after the post went live, Ms Delamere said both she and her son's father received an AI-generated image of Mr Battensoli, accompanied by a message:

"You gonna wire us $6,000 within 24 hrs or we cut off his neck and sell his body parts."

The 23-year-old has since been found safe and well in Perth, 168 kilometres north of his home in Bunbury.

Ms Delamere, who lives in New South Wales, said she could not believe scammers would go so far as to target the families of missing people.

"How could you do this to anybody?" she said.

"I was worried for my baby, but I had a feeling he was OK.

"But there's people out there that would be in turmoil and they would probably send people like that the money."

Scams on the rise

According to Scamwatch, 61,400 scams have been reported across the country so far this year, tricking Australians out of more than $94.5 million.

University of New South Wales cognitive psychologist James Dunn said AI growth has removed many barriers for online scammers.

"There are criminal organisations in Australia doing scamming, and there's criminal organisations internationally," he said.

"It lowers the cost for these scammers to make these scams feel personal … AI makes it really, really easy for you to target individuals.

"It's a very lucrative market ... for anyone who thinks this is a great way to make a buck."

Dr Dunn said the ease with which scammers could weaponise personal information and manipulate images was shifting the online scamming landscape.

"There are approaches which involve sending more generic things to lots of different people … we used to have Nigerian Prince scams in the past," he said.

"Now, with just a bit of information scraped from social media … that can be fed into AI and generate text that then they can send to you that creates that fear."

New levels of sophistication

Retired Bunbury detective and e-safety expert Kristi McVee said scammers exploiting people in vulnerable situations was a "massive issue."

"Many people are going to be secondary victims of it because that poor mother was already a victim of having lost her child and trying to find him," she said.

"And now she was a secondary victim of someone trying to extort money out of her.

"It's just terrifying — that's horrendous."

Ms McVee said a collaborative approach was the only way forward.

"It's only getting more sophisticated because the AI is so much better," she said.

"It's going to come down to obviously working together with our companies and our apps developers."

A WA Police spokesperson warned people to be alert to the tactics used by scammers.

"Members of the public should be aware that AI-generated content can appear highly realistic and should not automatically be accepted as genuine," they said.

"Offenders use [AI] material to pressure victims into providing money, personal information or access to accounts and devices."