Cybersecurity firms say open-weight AI models automate targeting of relatives
Chris Cline was sitting beside a hotel pool with his wife last month, preparing to attend an American Farm Bureau Federation conference in New Orleans, when a text arrived from an unknown California area code. The sender had created a group chat that included Cline’s wife, Jeanne; his son-in-law, Jordan Parmley; Parmley’s parents; and, in a final addition, Cline’s 16-year-old son. “All the Cline family and the Parmley family I have something to show y’all,” the sender wrote. “About to start guys.”
“Block the number Chris,” Parmley responded in the group.
Before Cline could block the number, the sender attached two images. The first was a photograph pulled from Allyson’s public Facebook account, showing Allyson and Parmley in a golf cart. The second appeared to depict Allyson in a sexual act. Cline gathered that the messages were leading to a demand for money to prevent the further release of ostensibly AI-generated images.
Allyson and Parmley were watching a television show in their home in Park Hills, Mo., when the messages arrived. Parmley, who works remotely for a power company, told the Journal he was immediately suspicious before seeing the image. “We don’t take photos like that because we know how insecure phones can be, and we’re not like that anyway,” he said. “My heart dropped in my stomach,” Allyson, a medical receptionist, said. “I felt like my identity had been ripped from me.”
The family members blocked the number. There was confusion about what was happening. “My in-laws called us immediately and asked what this was,” Allyson said. “We walked them through how to get rid of the photo and how to mark the message as spam and report it.”
The family considered whether a wedding e-vite Parmley had responded to that day might have enabled the attack — so-called fake-invitation scams that steal email credentials are a growing problem — but Allyson said the couple confirmed the invitation had come from their actual friends.
Cybersecurity experts told the Journal the family’s experience could happen to anyone. One family member, or a contact they share, may have had a compromised email account used to harvest phone numbers and relationship details; the information may also have been gathered from publicly available sources online. In either case, AI was likely used to pull the data together.
“If you take over someone’s email account that has contacts, you have all the information you need,” said Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at cybersecurity software company McAfee. “Emails, phone numbers and hints from messages of how people are related.”
Michael Scheumack, chief innovation and marketing officer at IdentityIQ, the firm Cline represents, said such operations no longer require human targeting. “This is all automated,” Scheumack said. “It’s not someone sitting there researching people, they’re using AI to scrape social-media accounts and publicly available images.”
Grobman, at the cybersecurity software company McAfee, said the open-weight AI models enabling such operations are not the consumer chatbots that might detect abuse. “Bad actors are not using the AI services consumers use, like Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude, which would have the ability to observe what they’re doing and stop them,” Grobman said. “They’re most likely using models that are running on dedicated machines.” Creating the fake sexual images is similarly accessible, Grobman said, through any of numerous “clothes-removal” programs freely available online.
Allyson said the longer-term risk is not the immediate embarrassment but the possibility that the image survives and resurfaces. “I’m not sure where that image went,” she said. “My fear is that this could resurface and blow up more than it already has.”
Cline handles public relations for the Missouri Farm Bureau and counts IdentityIQ among his clients. He had helped that client pitch stories about sextortion in recent months — a category of crime in which teenage boys have lately been a key target — and was now confronting a similar attack on his own adult daughter through a family group chat.
The experts outlined steps they said everyone should take to limit exposure. Social-media accounts should be set to private, with follow requests limited to known contacts — which is what Allyson said she did after the incident. Strong, unique passwords should be used for every email, financial, and social-media account, and two-factor authentication should be enabled everywhere it is offered. Scheumack also recommended checking email and social-media account settings for unknown active sessions and ending them: if a scammer is logged in, the attacker can keep accessing the account after a password change. If a demand for money arrives, the experts advised not paying; instead, block the sender and report the phone number or social-media username to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. “If you don’t pay, will they send the photo?” Grobman said. “Possibly. If you do pay, will it guarantee they won’t? Not necessarily.”