Connection to AI seems tenuous. The article mostly just juxtaposes an existing scam with speculation like "An AI tool might be able to recognize a vacant property in a database faster than a human could or identify homes without mortgages attached to them" - which doesn't really make sense for what should already just be an API query. Plausible the current bottleneck is that the data is unstructured (e.g: PDF scans of documents) which OCR + LLM could help extract into a database? But at that point I feel you may as well run the same article about SQL, Excel, or photocopiers if it's just that it makes data structuring easier and a minor step in this scam happens to be checking for homes with no mortgage.<p>The one linked case of supposed actual AI usage, a looping video of a woman staring straight ahead not speaking or responding to requests, just sounds like the virtual webcam input trick people would use on sites like Omegle. It's the ability <i>to</i> respond to the request to raise her hand that would suggest something more advanced, like face-swapping.