Scammers Are Using AI Images to Fake Refunds, and This Is Exactly the Future We Were Warned About

Here's one of those stories that will shock absolutely no one.

According to a new report, scammers in China are now using AI-generated images to successfully claim refunds for products they never actually owned in the first place. Fake photos of broken items. Fake packaging damage. Fake "proof" that looks real enough to pass automated checks and tired human reviewers.

Because of course they are.

This is the inevitable next step of automation colliding with trust-based systems. Refund processes were designed for a world where photos were hard to fake and effort was a natural filter. AI quietly removed that friction. Now anyone with access to freely available tools can generate convincing evidence in seconds, no damage, no missing parts, no product at all.

The scary part isn't that scammers figured this out. It's that the system was always vulnerable, it just took better tools to expose it. Companies optimized for speed and customer satisfaction, and now those same optimizations are being exploited at scale.

What happens next is predictable. More aggressive verification. More hoops. Fewer instant refunds. Legit customers paying the inconvenience tax because trust has become computationally expensive.

This is all part of the new reality we live in now - one where photographs and videos are no longer proof of anything.

What is evidence anymore? I have no idea.

We didn't lose trust because people changed.
We lost it because evidence did.