The Department of Workforce Development and Wisconsin Watch indicate that a scam has started up of FAKE HEARINGS for workers compensation benefits. As Wisconsin Watch explains:
DWD spokesperson Haley McCoy told Wisconsin Watch that 10 Wisconsin workers reported receiving emails instructing them to attend “online workers’ compensation hearing(s)” via video call. The emails’ senders generally use “.org” addresses and bill themselves as government agencies like the “Workers’ Compensation Board.”
Workers who joined the calls via Zoom, WhatsApp, Teams and other video conferencing platforms sat through elaborate staged hearings complete with judges, bailiffs and attorneys, ending in a verdict in the workers’ favor. The fraudsters then told the injured workers that they could collect their compensation payout only after paying a fee to “finalize” the case. In some cases, victims also shared their Social Security numbers.
Notice what is going on here: in order to siphon money and identity credentials from these injured workers, elaborate fake hearings on video conferencing were being staged. Just wow!
The first big question here is how are the scammers targeting these injured workers? Initial contact information had to come from somewhere. Has there been a hack of multiple state agencies (probably unlikely)? A hospital chain? An insurer? A law firm?
Or, could some kind of AI have been used to “guess” at injured workers with some generic data and probably some basic, publicly available e-mail addresses that an AI model pulled together? “Hey AI: find me names and e-mail addresses of people in Wisconsin/Illinois/Indiana/Oregon who currently have a workplace injury of some kind?”
Note: Obviously, the actual AI/LLM queries will be more sophisticated than this example IF some basic safety protocols are in place. The point here is that AI/LLM models can provide this type of information. The current push for AI/LLM without any regulation is largely empowering an acceleration of these kinds of scams, identity and data theft, and a loss of all personal security and safety. See The growing problem of AI scams for a listing of these many problems.
This kind of guesswork is something current AI/LLM models are pretty good at doing. Facebook, Oracle/TikTok, and Google/YouTube already have all of this information available for their own AI/LLM models. So, all the scammers need to do with the results from this query is send a bunch of e-mail messages out to those identified and see who responds. Stage two are the fake hearings that these injured workers “win.” Stage three is the request for initial payment from their “representatives” so that these injured workers can then receive their fictitious workers compensation benefits. Easy peasy.
The second big question is when (if not already happening) do these fake hearings expand to other areas of law like unemployment, SNAP benefits, SSDI benefits, and other programs?
Unemployment debt (aka, unemployment warrants) are public records in Wisconsin via Wisconsin Circuit Court Access. As a result, names and addresses of employers and employees with unemployment debt are easily available and leads to scam debt help being received in the mail that can easily be mistaken for legitimate notices from the Department of Workforce Development.
So, address and name information are already publicly available for unemployment debts, which means that the scammers have even more information for their initial queries and contacts. All of the AI talk and effort at present is mostly just expanding and energizing the ability to scam and steal. As a result, this report of scam workers compensation hearings is likely just the first of many other similar scams in other areas of law, especially where the target audience is much larger.