South Snohomish County Crime Watch Hot Sheet: CYBERSECURITY MYTH- Phishing emails are easy to spot due to poor grammar and misspellings

Tuesday, June 16, 2026

CYBERSECURITY MYTH- Phishing emails are easy to spot due to poor grammar and misspellings

This might have been true in the past, but computer technology is advancing fast, giving scammers easier ways to fool us that an email or text message is authentic. Lately, cybersecurity professionals have been warning about the easy use of AI by scammers to leverage their crimes. They cite several AI capabilities that improve scammers’ abilities to victimize people,

· Hyper-personalized messages. AI can quickly collect personal data from social media profiles, work bios, and the dark web to personalize any email or text message. This makes the message feel personal and authoritative if you think it is coming from a friend, a coworker, or a business that you know and trust.

· Perfect grammar and zero typos. AI can know the proper grammar and spelling for any language. This leverages the effectiveness and breadth of a scammer’s campaign.

· Deepfake audio and video. AI can create audio and video that looks and sounds like any real person. Useful for phone calls that sound like they are from your boss or from your grandchild to convince you to act quickly.

· Large-scale automated attacks. While scammers have long taken advantage of computer automation to conduct their scam campaigns, AI super sizes their capabilities to allow them to create customized messages faster, more creatively, and to more people.

· Dangerous links in disguise. AI allows scammers to create more genuine looking fake webpages, making it more difficult to distinguish them from real webpages. Also, AI can create authentic looking URLs.

Probably the scariest capability of AI scams is deepfake audio and video. AI can efficiently and rapidly find voice samples or pictures to use for telephone calls or for video. And there is no more checking for six fingers on hands. AI video capability has become way better.

AI allows scammers to quickly and efficiently develop a more effective scam campaign without the scammer needing many high-tech skills, expanding the availability of “good quality” fake audio, video, emails, texts, and websites to more criminals.

While AI makes audio, video, emails, text messages, and web sites look more genuine, there are still red flags that you can look for.

· Urgency. The scammer wants you to act quickly to make a payment or click on an included link or call a provided phone number in an emotional and urgent situation that the scammer has made up. You should be especially wary if the scammer discourages you from talking to someone else about the situation. cut off communication! If you feel the situation is genuine, talk to a friend or family member or contact the organization that the scammer claims to represent separately.

· Payment. If you are required to make payment with crypto currency, wire transfers, gift cards, or peer-to-peer apps, cut off communications. These methods are like cash and funds paid through these methods are almost impossible to recover.

· URL’s. Inspect URL’s of links and email addresses for genuineness. Small spelling mistakes or unusual domains such as “.xyz” instead of “.com” can be tip offs that the links will take you to a webpage that is controlled by the scammer.

Two suggestions,

Safe Word. Cybersecurity professionals are encouraging you to establish a safe word among your family, coworkers, close friends, elderly adults and caregivers, to help verify who you are talking to, especially in an emotional or urgent situation. A safe word can help a family in a grandparent scam. A safe word can help a business in an imposter scam when it looks like the boss is telling you to pay a large amount of money to a client or vendor using an account that is normally not used.

Be your own fact checker. A common rule of thumb is to not click on links or call phone numbers imbedded in emails or text messages, especially if they are suspicious. Contact the company, governmental agency, or organization from a trusted source. This can be the customer service number on the back of your credit card, an invoice or bill, or the website that you have looked up separately.

Scammers are rapidly adopting AI into their operations. The improvement of their fake websites, emails, text messages and audio/video increases the difficulty to detect fakes. This requires all of us to be more careful when we see these types of communication.

CBS News:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elder-scams-family-safe-word/

National Cybersecurity Alliance:

https://www.staysafeonline.org/articles/why-your-family-and-coworkers-need-a-safe-word-in-the-age-of-ai

The Seattle Times:

https://www.seattletimes.com/life/travel/ai-is-making-travel-scams-nearly-impossible-to-spot-heres-what-to-do/?utm_source=marketingcloud&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning+Brief+02-23-26_2_23_2026&utm_term=Active%20subscriber

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/ai-is-making-scams-hard-to-spot-heres-how-to-protect-yourself/

Identity Theft Resource Center:

https://www.idtheftcenter.org/post/ai-scams-harder-to-detect/

https://www.idtheftcenter.org/post/ai-scams-2025/

https://www.idtheftcenter.org/post/voice-cloning-scam/

https://www.idtheftcenter.org/podcast/weekly-breach-breakdown-ai-scams-cybersecurity-risks/