AI is a fraudster’s best friend

Fraud is the oldest profession. Con artists have always found ways to separate honest people from their money, and governments have always barely kept up. However acceptable that old balance was, it’s gone now. AI has handed scammers a tool that didn’t exist five years ago: a way to lie that most people simply cannot detect. It will get worse, very soon.

President Trump has made fighting fraud a defining goal of his administration. His team has gone after Medicaid cheats, SNAP abuse, and fraudulent childcare payments with a seriousness Washington rarely shows, busting billion-dollar abuse cases across the Midwest, and prosecuting grifters who are stunned by the sudden accountability. It’s real work, and it matters to states like Montana, where federal dollars don’t always go where they’re intended, intercepted by those who can game the system. Every fraudulent claim that gets paid is a good person denied needed and deserved help.

With a new threat forming faster than existing law can handle, the people most at risk are the ones least equipped to see it coming. Voice cloning is already in use. A criminal can now call an elderly woman in Billings, sounding exactly like her son. The voice is right. The cadence is right. The ask comes a few minutes in; there’s an emergency, he needs money, please don’t tell anyone else. She has no way to know it isn’t him. The technology to pull this off costs almost nothing and takes less than a minute of audio to build.

Seniors are the primary target because they tend to answer the phone, because they trust what they hear, and because they’re often handling these calls alone. In dollars, millions are lost to these scams every year. Law enforcement knows what’s happening but lack the legal tools to prosecute the people behind it.

And that’s just the scam running today.

What happens when the same technology starts filing fraudulent federal grant applications? When AI submits fake benefit claims at scale, assembling paperwork that looks legitimate, with names and credentials that check out, moving faster than any human reviewer can catch? The money meant for Montana farmers, rural hospitals, and working families gets siphoned before anyone realizes the forms were fraudulent. In theory, an entire team could do this today, but that used to require too many bodies and too much time to keep it away from the feds. The tools now exist for one person to do this. Nothing in current law clearly prohibits using them this way.

Montana’s U.S. Sen.Tim Sheehy saw this coming. The bipartisan AI Fraud Accountability Act, which he introduced earlier this year alongside Democrat U.S. Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware, updates federal law to make digital impersonation with intent to defraud, a federal crime. It establishes criminal penalties, gives the FTC tools for civil enforcement, and directs federal agencies to build the detection systems we’ll need to fight this at scale. A companion bill is moving through the House. The legislation also protects legitimate uses of AI, including parody, satire, and journalism - all pillars of free speech. It cleared both sides of the aisle because this problem doesn’t care about party lines, and as he keeps proving, Sheehy doesn’t either.

This legislation could be a proud chapter of the Trump administration’s anti-fraud campaign. The president went after the fraud that was bleeding taxpayers dry in plain sight. Sheehy is making sure the next wave, the kind that uses AI to hide in the paperwork and automate the deception, doesn’t get a free run at our seniors, our children, or the federal dollars that belong to Montana.

Montanans don’t have much patience for people who take what isn’t theirs. That goes for the scammer calling your grandmother and for the fraudulent grant application draining money your community was supposed to receive. Washington doesn’t always share that instinct. But Sen. Sheehy has brought Montana values back to Congress. While AI never sleeps, it may be awakening a sleeping giant.

Rep. Braxton Mitchell, R-Columbia Falls, represents House District 5 in the Flathead and serves as House Majority Whip.