Campaign Warns Troops and Military Families About AI Scams
- Value Our Vets
- Sep 16
- 2 min read
A new public-awareness campaign is raising alarms over fraudulent scams that use artificial intelligence to impersonate soldiers — targeting military members and their families.
The nonprofit We the Veterans & Military Families, via its Homefront Sentinel project, released a series of PSA’s showing completely computer-generated images and voices of fake service members, to demonstrate how realistic AI-based scams have become.
Their concern: military families are especially vulnerable. With steady incomes and strong social reputations, they are attractive targets for impersonation fraud, phishing, identity theft, and schemes by foreign adversaries using generative
According to Ellen Gustafson, a Navy spouse and executive director of the advocacy group, these scams aren’t new — but they are growing more sophisticated. She points out that often veteran identity and affiliated trust are used to build legitimacy in these frauds.
Some facts from the campaign:
In 2024, military consumers made 99,000+ fraud complaints; about 43,000 were imposter scams. These frauds cost service members and their families roughly $178 million.
Military personnel and spouses are taken advantage of at rates similar to the civilian population, but when military-affiliated people are scammed, they tend to lose more money — about 20% more on average.
The campaign’s strategy involves educating people in military communities to spot false “soldiers” (both online and in communications), to verify what they see, and to call out scams they encounter. Examples include flirtation scams using fake military personnel, or phishing schemes using images and voices that appear to be from real soldiers.
The group urges military families to be alert, especially when approached online or on social media by people who claim military affiliation, and to question authenticity — because the technology is only getting better at deception.
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