Synthetic Trust Attacks: Modeling How Generative AI Manipulates Human Decisions in Social Engineering Fraud
Imagine receiving a video call from your CFO, surrounded by colleagues, asking you to urgently authorise a confidential transfer. You comply. Every person on that call was fake, and you just lost $25 million. This is not a hypothetical. It happened in Hong Kong in January 2024, and it is becoming the template for a new generation of fraud. AI has not invented a new crime. It has industrialised an ancient one: the manufacture of trust. This paper proposes Synthetic Trust Attacks (STAs) as a formal threat category and introduces STAM, the Synthetic Trust Attack Model, an eight-stage operational framework covering the full attack chain from adversary reconnaissance through post-compliance le...
| Authors | Muhammad Tahir Ashraf |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 2 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 April 2026 |
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