When Marcus Nohlberg began researching social manipulation in the early 2000s, he thought it would be about how to make people less gullible.
Now I have understood that it's not about that, but about getting people to resist incredibly sophisticated attacks from people who have made a career out of this, he says.
The classic advice such as "don't click on links" and "hang up" is no longer enough, he thinks.
It simply doesn't work as advice, it's a much more difficult issue.
"Extremely scary"
His latest project showed that it is also possible to quickly learn to become a manipulative phone scammer. It took fewer than 20 calls.
It's extremely scary. You tend to think that scammers are people who have been doing this for several years and have become extremely skilled. But give it a few days and a decent script, and you're there.
The scammers are also using the latest technology to their advantage. It's quick to copy websites and formulate linguistically correct text with the help of AI. Numbers and email addresses can appear to be correct, and those who have been tricked into calling the scammers themselves can be put on hold and transferred - all to increase credibility.
What I now call a regular scam today, it looked almost like advanced science fiction fifteen years ago.
Pretend to be police
Romance scammers can spend months luring people into the trap, as well as various investment scams, often targeting crypto.
Many of these international actors are incredibly organized. It's large-scale crime in gigantic call centers abroad.
Closer to home, Nohlberg mentions scammers who first call, then personally visit, for example, the elderly and claim to be from the police.
They can say that "we've had a lot of burglaries in your neighborhood" and have an offer to collect valuables for storage.
There are already several notable examples where voices have been cloned in sophisticated scams. Nohlberg believes that the technology will soon be used widely - that a relative is on the other end of the line.
It's not even particularly difficult - you need a few minutes of sound and you can fake a voice almost perfectly.
