Fake Social Proof: The Cheapest Fraud Tool AI Has Created

Humans use the behavior of others as a shortcut for evaluating unfamiliar situations — and Felix Bick’s How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps explains, in unsettling detail, how cheaply and effectively scammers now manufacture that behavior wholesale.

Chapter 7 of the book walks through how fake testimonials, paid reviews, purchased followers, and coordinated comment sections have become inexpensive to produce and genuinely difficult for an ordinary user to distinguish from organic enthusiasm. Bick is direct about how AI has changed the economics here: a single operator can now generate hundreds of unique, plausible-sounding written testimonials, along with AI-voiced video reviews and AI-generated “customer” faces, in a single afternoon.

Screenshots, Bick notes, are trivial to fabricate or lift entirely from unrelated legitimate accounts — a theme the book returns to repeatedly across multiple chapters given how central fake screenshots are to fraud marketing.

The book offers a genuinely useful contrast: genuine social proof tends to be independently verifiable — a regulatory filing, a named individual with a traceable professional history, or a review on a platform with fraud-detection systems of its own. Bick recommends reflexive skepticism toward testimonials, screenshots, and follower counts that cannot be independently traced back to a real, accountable source.

This chapter is particularly relevant given how much investment decision-making now happens through social platforms, where the line between organic enthusiasm and manufactured hype has become genuinely difficult to see without deliberate scrutiny. Bick’s framework — trust what’s independently verifiable, distrust what isn’t — gives readers a durable principle that doesn’t depend on staying ahead of the latest fabrication technique.

How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps treats this topic with the seriousness it deserves, given how central manufactured social proof has become to modern investment fraud.