AI scams are on the rise and they are getting disturbingly personal, with some fraudsters even managing to sound like loved ones.
For cybersecurity brand Bitdefender, protecting families now means tackling the emotional and psychological side of these scams while also confronting the uncomfortable truth that AI is fueling the next wave of digital deception.
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In its latest B2C campaign, Bitdefender uses AI not just as a subject but as the medium itself. The hero film was crafted almost entirely with generative tools, using synthetic voices, deepfakes and AI-driven visuals to mirror how scammers now operate. The scammer himself appears in live action – a deliberate choice that was integral to the narrative.
“This was never about fear-mongering,” says 20(Something)’s creative director Will Thacker. “It was about emotional truth and about showing how something so human, like trust, is being hijacked by technology – and it’s cold, fast and convincing.”
20(Something) explored a few different creative routes before landing on one evocative idea: scams are psychological warfare. With shame being the number one emotion reported by scam victims, the campaign deliberately shifts the lens from victim-blaming to systemic alarm.
“Too often, society and the media blame the victim for being ‘duped,’ instead of focusing on the crime and the criminal,” says Lucinda Gosling, strategy director at 20(Something). “We want to shift that narrative because scams can happen to anyone and the only way to break their power is to bring them and their tactics out of secrecy and into the open.”
The campaign runs across digital billboards in select regions of North America and on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Reddit.
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