Fraud expert warns AI is helping criminals outpace the government: 'Don't have the right tools'

A fraud expert who testified before the House Oversight Committee Wednesday warned the federal government lacks the tools and policies needed to prevent criminals from using artificial intelligence against taxpayers.

"What's happening right now is the fact that we simply don't have the right tools to deal with fraud," David Maimon, head of Fraud Insights at SentiLink, told Fox News Digital.

"We don't have the right policies to deal with fraud. We don't have enough deterrence. We have no close collaboration between the government and the [private] sector to try and find the right solution to this issue."

The hearing, titled "Emerging Fraud Threats and the Evolving Fraud Landscape," was held by the Government Operations Subcommittee as the Trump administration wages a nationwide "War on Fraud," led by Vice President JD Vance, and focused on how the federal government can better detect and prevent emerging fraud threats through stronger digital identity verification.

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"Fraud against government programs is no longer a series of isolated schemes," Maimon told lawmakers during the hearing. "It is a durable, specialized criminal infrastructure."

He also told lawmakers that "criminals exploit the seams between agencies precisely because our defenses are built program by program, while their infrastructure is built to move across all of them."

Maimon highlighted how his company has collected intelligence to "understand how the criminals work, what they do, and how they do what they do," while uncovering networks where fraudsters share stolen information and tactics.

"We were able to infiltrate thousands of markets where fraudsters are operating, where you can find identities and stolen checks, you can find tutorials of how to engage in fraud against the government or target financial institutions across the country," he said.

One of the biggest challenges, he said, is keeping pace with rapidly evolving fraud tactics.

"The most important thing is to make sure that the government is aware of some of the fraud trends we're seeing out there that fraudsters are engaging in, essentially stealing taxpayers' money," Maimon said.

Maimon said the government’s slow deployment of fraud-fighting tools allows criminals to "take advantage of these opportunities" and "continue to exploit" resources.

"The bad guys are moving faster than the government," he said. "While the government is still trying to catch up and roll out better tools, criminals keep finding new ways to steal money."

Criminals are now using AI to create fake documents, videos, and phishing emails that steal passwords and personal information or bypass identity verification, according to Maimon.

"It's difficult to prove that you're not essentially using AI while verifying your identity with documents and liveness tests and selfie images," he said.

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During the hearing, Maimon said that fraudsters are already using "AI-generated faces and deepfake video to defeat liveness checks at digital banks and tax preparers."

Pointing to his earlier investigation of Medicaid fraud, Maimon said his team discovered providers that had billed the government about $2 million and claimed to have staff and caregivers, but when investigators visited the addresses in person, many of the employees and operations didn't exist.

"Sometimes you need to take a look at signals that appear in the database, but also at the physical location," he said.

Instead of relying on a picture or video, Maimon said the government should verify identities using trusted historical data that is harder for AI to fake.

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"In order to make sure that we address this issue, and it really depends on the type of fraud that you're dealing with, but to address this issue in a more effective way, maybe we need to have some historical signals around identities we're trying to verify, rather than just looking at images that could be created easily by AI tools," he said.

Maimon told lawmakers the fraud affects more than the government's finances, ultimately hurting the people these programs are designed to serve, saying "Every dollar we protect from organized fraud is a dollar that stays available for the people Congress intended to help.

But after years of studying dark web and Telegram marketplaces, Maimon said law enforcement has uncovered only a fraction of organized fraud.

"I think they're just scratching the surface."