Synthetic Trust Attacks: Modeling How Generative AI Manipulates Human Decisions in Social Engineering Fraud

ArXi:2604.04951v1 Announce Type: cross Imagine receiving a video call from your CFO, surrounded by colleagues, asking you to urgently authorise a confidential transfer. You comply. Every person on that call was fake, and you just lost $25M. This is not a hypothetical. It happened in Hong Kong in January 2024, and it is becoming the template for a new generation of fraud. AI has not invented a new crime. It has industrialised an ancient one: the manufacture of trust. This paper proposes Synthetic Trust Attacks (STAs) as a formal threat category and.