At 3:47 AM, Sarah’s phone buzzed. The WhatsApp message that appeared would make any parent’s blood freeze. On her screen was an explicit image, her eight-year-old daughter’s face mapped onto a stranger’s body. The caption was short, surgical: “Give me access to your company’s database, or I send this to your boss, your neighbors, your child’s school.”

Sarah, a data analyst at a major Pakistani bank, knew the image was fake. But her trembling hands still reached for her laptop. Logic was irrelevant. Fear had already won.

The Nightmare That’s Already Here

This isn’t science fiction. It’s Tuesday afternoon somewhere in the world. Recent reports show an alarming rise in AI enabled sextortion and corporate blackmail cases. Voice cloning, deepfake video, and large language models have turned old scams into psychological warfare.

According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), 2025 has seen a 300% rise in AI generated sextortion incidents, with over 50,000 reported cases in the U.S. alone. One of them involved Elijah, a 14-year-old boy, who tragically took his life after being blackmailed with a fake AI generated nude.

PICTURE TAKEN FROM RECENT CBC NEWS ARTICLE

In Hong Kong, an engineer attended what seemed like a normal video call with colleagues and the CFO. The meeting felt real, faces, voices, gestures, but every participant was a deepfake, digitally puppeted to perfection. By the end of the call, the firm had transferred $25 million into fraudulent accounts.

This wasn’t a hack. It was a heist of trust.

The Corporate Siege You Never Saw Coming

While we obsessed over passwords and firewalls, the threat evolved. AI scammers stopped breaking in, they started walking through the front door, using our faces, voices, and emotions as master keys.

Research by me and Leena Tarar reveals how AI powered scams exploit emotion before logic. These criminals don’t crack systems, they crack people. In Pakistan, where cyber awareness remains low and regulation nearly absent, this weaponisatio of empathy has found fertile ground.

Take Arup’s case again, the CFO’s digital double spoke flawlessly, even referencing private internal details. The employee trusted what he saw. Fifteen wire transfers later, the money vanished across borders.

In Pakistan, meanwhile, 80% of scam complaints still relate to old-school fraud, like fake Benazir Income Support texts. The storm hasn’t arrived here yet, but the clouds are gathering.

The Escalation That Never Ends

Every day, AI makes these attacks cheaper, faster, and more local. Voice cloning now needs just 3 seconds of audio, easily scraped from Instagram stories or TikTok videos. Face swapping software works in real-time on standard laptops. Language models mimic cultural and linguistic nuances, from Karachi’s Urdu slang to Quetta’s Pashto tones, to build perfect emotional traps.

New Chinese open-source models like Wan 2.5 have made it possible to automate entire scam pipelines. The technology once used for entertainment now powers automated deepfake fraud systems. The tools aren’t hidden on the dark web anymore, they’re one GitHub repository away.

The Children Who Pay the Price

Behind every corporate breach, there’s often a child whose image or voice was the bait.

School photos become raw material for deepfake generation. Family WhatsApp videos become voice samples. Innocent laughter becomes the emotional weapon that unlocks a company’s most sensitive data.

The collateral isn’t financial, it’s psychological. Families collapse under the pressure of digital blackmail. Employees resign silently. Teenagers withdraw from social media, fearing their next selfie could be used against them.

AI didn’t invent exploitation. It simply industrialised it.

The Untraceable Perfect Crime

Pakistani cybercriminals have now learned from international models, blending AI deception with local emotional cues. They fabricate emergencies, impersonate family members, and extract corporate secrets while leaving behind digital ghosts.

Law enforcement remains helpless. Traditional investigation tools rely on forensics of authenticity, but in an age of synthetic media, truth itself can be manufactured. By the time evidence is verified, the scammers have vanished into the anonymity of encrypted networks.

It’s no longer about stealing passwords. It’s about stealing perception.

The Future That’s Already Here

Every Pakistani company is now a potential hostage. Corporate emails, Zoom recordings, and LinkedIn profiles provide enough data for full identity replication. While executives enjoy media interviews, criminals collect reference footage to forge real-time video calls.

And the silence is deafening. Firms hide their breaches to protect reputations. Employees don’t report incidents out of fear. The weaponization of shame ensures no one speaks, and that’s exactly what the attackers want.

Meanwhile, global media celebrates AI breakthroughs without realizing that the same models are being deployed to dismantle the very economies they’re meant to uplift.

The Acceleration of Corporate Colonisation

This is more than cybercrime, it’s a new kind of digital colonialism.

Rich nations develop AI for efficiency, poorer ones receive the side effects. The same voice model that powers customer care in London impersonates CEOs in Lahore. The same generative model that crafts ads in New York fabricates explicit fakes of children in Karachi.

The balance of digital power is shifting. Pakistan’s data becomes the resource, its people the experiment, its companies the victims.

As Muhammad Tahir Ashraf (Beyond Tahir), Chair of AAAI Pakistan, notes in his latest research with Leena Tarar: “We’re not just fighting code; we’re fighting an illusion factory that weaponizes empathy and trust.”

Their research, “The Perfect Scam: How AI Learned to Steal Your Voice, Your Face, and Your Trust,” published on Zenodo, lays bare the anatomy of these crimes, the pipelines, models, and psychological blueprints behind the scams now infiltrating developing nations.

The Path Forward: Out-of-Band Truth

If truth can be faked, the only defense is verification beyond machines. Corporations must adopt out-of-band confirmation protocols: verify all fund transfers through secondary channels, never trust video or audio alone, and establish emotional awareness training for employees.

Every organization should maintain AI blackmail readiness plans, just as they do for fire drills. Families must educate children about digital kidnapping and avoid oversharing online.

On a national level, Pakistan must accelerate deepfake legislation and cross-border AI crime treaties.

The gap is wide, but awareness is the first firewall.

The Final Warning

The perfect scam isn’t coming. It’s here. It’s targeting your employees, using your children’s laughter, and rewriting your corporate history in real-time. Every face, every voice, every word online is potential ammunition.

And as AI evolves, these scams won’t just take your money, they’ll take your reality.

The question isn’t whether Pakistan can stop the wave. It’s whether we’ll even recognise it before it sweeps us away.

Full research available at: Zenodo.org/records/17345106

P.S. This research was conducted by Muhammad Tahir Ashraf with the collaboration of co-author Leena Tarar . The same article is also published on BeyondTahir.com, the official website owned by Muhammad Tahir Ashraf.