AI Saved Me From A Scam

I almost fell for it.

Recently, I started a Faceless TikTok to explore creating fun AI-generated videos (check it out here).

My fifth post got this comment:

I was surprised and flattered.

At the time, 1.3 Etherium was $2,200.

That’s a lot of money to offer for the work of an unknown person with only a handful of followers.

Red flags for sure, but I checked out her profile, and it seemed legit. Thousands of followers. Pictures of a real woman with art and artists.

I was curious, so I sent her a DM, and she replied:

Now, we weren’t just talking $2,200, but $6,600!

Looking at it with fresh eyes, it’s obvious there was some kind of scam, but I couldn’t tell what the angle was.

So I turned to the latest version of Claude (3.7 Sonnet) and asked what it thought. (You can access Claude 3.7 here or use Poe like I do.)

Its response confirmed that I was likely being scammed:

I asked how to respond, and Claude crafted a reply and gave me its reasoning:

In “Katie’s” response, she gave me the link to a marketplace where this transaction would happen.

In the past, to find out if this was a legit site, I would have searched Google.

Now, I use Perplexity.

Perplexity provides citations for its answers. I use it for situations like this because it lets me fact-check for myself (I still find the other LLMs do a fair amount of hallucinating).

Here’s Perplexity’s response:

A little digging confirmed it.

I was not about to become the world’s next NFT thousand-aire.

Which left me feeling a bit like…

But glad I was saved from a scam.

Unfortunately, the Wild West of the internet isn’t slowing down, and scams like this are everywhere.

So the next time you spot something fishy online, run it through an AI tool like Perplexity or Claude.

Let me know what you uncover—I might feature your detective work in the next newsletter!

From someone else: Here's how I use Gemini Gems for work and play

Thanks for reading,

Nathan