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- The Future of Scamming
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The Future of Scamming
You do have to hand it to them: The Hollywood Reporter can write about AI in an informative way when they want to! This is from their recent piece on the plague of AI-powered scammers taking advantage of some of the entertainment business’s most hopeful (gullible) members: actors!
Over the course of at least half a year, one or multiple scammers have been impersonating some of Hollywood’s most prominent casting directors among an especially vulnerable population of actors, many of them early in their career. A fake Carmen Cuba, who cast Stranger Things, is out there raising hopes. There’s an imposter version of Avatar casting director Margery Simkin and a simulated J.J. Ogilvy, who cast Riverdale and The Good Doctor. The fakes are contacting performers in the hope of extracting money through different methods, but often in the form of union fees.
As the article notes, scams are not new to entertainment but are now being supercharged with AI. They even accurately replicated the voice of a famous casting director:
In a voice memo sent to her by an actor, and shared with THR, a scammer pretending to be Simkin tells the mark, “I am sending this voice note to clear the air and let you know this is truly me and not a damn scam from, from Africa.” The voice on the audio is somewhat halting, its choice of words strange, but it undeniably sounds like Simkin’s.
The Writers’ Union of Canada has posted its own warning about the increase in scams preying on hopeful writers looking to have their books turned into movies:
Wow, I just pay $2000 and my book gets turned into a movie. What a steal!
Wired also published its own scam investigation, this one on how adept LLMs are at social engineering:
“I think everybody admits that if these models are really, really good at reasoning and writing, then they’re probably really good at social engineering,” Galen says. And yet there is surprisingly little effort to quantify these capabilities or risks.
The way AI models tend to flatter and ingratiate in conversations—a tendency known as sycophancy—make them ideal tools for stringing people along in scams.
I think this is really the most dangerous part of AI-powered scamming: the sycophancy. We have already witnessed countless cases of AI psychosis, everyone from average Joes to venture capitalists. Unlike their human counterparts, AI scammers won’t eventually get pissed off and give up the game:
So what is to be done? I guess… just keep giving the AI companies money? That seems to be the current plan!
The Hollywood Tech Nerds Scam Poll
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Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:
The TikTok ban was never about TikTok. (link)
The 7 biggest announcements from Apple WWDC. (link)
What’s happening at Summer Game Fest 2026. (link)