Oct 21, 2026Unverified
Purportedly AI-Generated Calls Impersonating Banks Reportedly Helped Steal €380,000 from Customers in the Netherlands
AI used as a weaponDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 27, 2026. How entries are approved
Scammers allegedly used AI-generated bank-warning recordings to draw people in the Netherlands into calls with impersonators posing as bank staff. Victims were reportedly persuaded to install an app that relayed their bank cards' contactless data to accomplices at cash machines or payment terminals. Police reportedly documented about 170 victims and €380,000 in losses during three weeks of server monitoring.
What this means for youIf you get a call claiming to be your bank, hang up and call the number on your card yourself. Banks will not ask you to install an app or hold your card near a phone or terminal. Businesses should warn staff that urgent bank calls can be fake, even when the voice sounds real.
Sources
- AI Incident Databasehttps://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1788
Data from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. IAAI-21.
Source data license: CC BY-SA 4.0 (database). Report contents keep their own rights; reports.text, submissions, images and videos are excluded from the data license.
counter:harm.scamscountry:NLapproved:person
Covered by snapshot 47
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