New data from National Trading Standards (NTS) reveals nearly half (47%) of people believe it is getting harder to tell what is genuine online.

Nearly a quarter (24%) of respondents to the Censuswide poll of 2,000 UK adults cited by NTS said the advent of AI had left them feeling "overwhelmed" by the growing sophistication of scams.

"Intelligence shows AI is not necessarily creating new types of scams, it is supercharging existing ones," said NTS, which has ranked travel and ticket scams among the top 10 types of scam being supercharged by AI.

Its new AI Scam Watchlist, published on Wednesday (30 September) highlights the top five AI-powered scam techniques of greatest concern to consumers.

These are fake or cloned websites, voice cloning, deepfake video, AI-generated images and digital humans.

"Shopping, holiday, investment and romance scams can now be made more convincing, personalised and scalable," said NTS.

While nearly two-thirds (62%) of survey respondents said they felt confident they could spot a scam created by AI, more than a third (35%) said they felt AI would make scams harder to spot in future.

Steve Abrahamson, Abta's Head of Risk Management, said: "Unfortunately, AI will further enable fraudsters by using increasingly sophisticated methods to target consumers, with much more convincing websites and fake travel documentation.

"Travel related fraud has a particular focus on destinations and times of year when demand is high and availability limited, as criminals know people will be looking for good deals.

"Victims will often only find out they have been defrauded just before they are due to travel, or even in resort, when it can be very difficult to find a legitimate replacement leading to yet more cost and potential disappointment."