Bots outnumber humans online. Can we at least outsmart them?

A few reports have already confirmed that bot traffic has surpassed human activity online. Criminals seem to be in the lead, applying automation tools at scale to swindle people like you and me, and push companies out of business.

Here are a few telling numbers for you.

Bot traffic has eclipsed human visits, with automated traffic growing eight times faster than human traffic, according to Human Security.

A report by Thales also concluded that it’s bots that are making the most fuss online, with automated traffic accounting for 53% of all internet traffic. What’s more, malicious bots were responsible for 40% of all internet activity last year.

The threat actors behind malicious bot traffic employ a wide array of attacks to steal money from victims, including brute-force attacks, vulnerability scanning, and the exploitation of business logic, among others.

It’s becoming crucial to protect yourself from malicious bots online, as they inflate costs for businesses operating online.

For individual users, bots also sour almost every online experience.

Persuasive chatbots fool even the smartest people

Scamming is a numbers game, Mael Le Touz, Infoblox’s staff threat researcher, tells me. The more processes they automate, the wider the net they can cast, leading to more victims being scammed.

Recently, Infoblox investigated two prevalent types of online scams – investment "opportunities" and romance scams. While the specific campaign that Infoblox experts tracked targeted Asian victims, global trends reveal the same pattern: criminals are adopting AI at breakneck speed.

I sat down virtually with Mael L. to discuss the latest trends in the bot world.

Analyzing cryptocurrency investment scams, researchers discovered AI bots designed to resemble real investment experts, capable of engaging victims in constant interaction, sharing fabricated success stories, and even offering various rewards.

“Over time, they persuade victims to commit progressively larger amounts of money, culminating in a final demand for a so‑called 'release fee' to unlock profits (which do not exist),” Infoblox research stated.

Japanese broadcaster RCC Chugoku Broadcasting reported a case of a man in his 60s who lost $63,000 to bot fraud.

While the researchers didn’t share the specific details about the chatbots that fraudsters abuse, Mael L. assured us that almost any chatbot can be coerced quite easily.

“It's really a standard conversation, trying to push people towards an investment. And the psychology and the mechanism are still the same, whether it's a human behind a screen or not. It's always that call to action, that fear of missing out, that promise of some kind of relationship, or that pervasive, you know, considerable financial gains,” he told me.

How do these scams start?

Infoblox described two prevalent ways criminals operate. Victims are often lured via malicious ads that promote “best” investment algorithms or impersonate well-known financial professionals. Victims are then eventually drawn to one-on-one chats with those “experts.”

Another popular way to lure crypto out of victims is the so-called pig butchering scam. Essentially, fraudsters pretend to be interested in victims for romantic reasons, and eventually trick people into fake investments before disappearing with the stolen money.

Luring victims via dating apps used to be a labor-intensive scam. Nowadays, while a human scammer is still in the loop, much of it is automated. For example, criminals use AI to take notes on victims, collecting and memorizing all the necessary personal information they can use later, pretending to be attentive listeners and remembering, for example, your relatives’ names.

But a scam can start even more casually, according to Mael L.

“It can come from dating, it can be something professional, like, hey, I have a job opportunity for you. It can be just something more random, like, hey, I've seen you at the Houston airport, and you'll be like, no, I wasn't there, or I was there, you know? Anything can snowball into a conversation,” he said.

Any online interaction can spiral into a scam. Individual users must continually work to address the trust challenge online. Here’s the advice that Mael L. shared with me.

“Scams are very sophisticated and are exploiting a lot of different weaknesses, both how the internet works and how our mind works, how we trust people, and how we assume we know people because we've spoken with them for a long time. (...) Scammers will usually try to put some kind of time constraint on you. I need money now. I need you to commit to me now. I need to do this now. The best advice is probably to sleep on it,” he said.

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