Earlier this year, Jack Stubbs, a lead member of OpenAI’s Intelligence and Investigations team, received a text message from a Cambodian number promising easy money for “simple tasks." Suspicious, he copied the message into ChatGPT and asked a simple question: Is this a scam? The model flagged multiple warning signs—urgent language, suspicious links, and requests for deposits—and offered step-by-step advice on how to stay safe.
For Stubbs, that moment captured both sides of his work. Speaking at the latest OpenAI Forum, Scams in the Age of AI, Stubbs described how his team helps detect and disrupt organized criminal networks trying to misuse AI—while also empowering millions of people to use the same technology as a personal safety tool. “The reality is that the vast majority of scam activity we see is more prosaic,” he said, noting that scammers mainly use AI to write messages faster, translate them into more languages, and automate their work. “It's more about fitting AI into an existing scam playbook rather than creating new playbooks built around AI.”
Over the past year, his team has helped uncover and disrupt major operations based in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Nigeria, exposing schemes that used AI to generate fake job ads, run fraudulent investment platforms, and even manage the day-to-day logistics of scam centers. Stubbs outlined a simple framework for how most scams unfold—the “ping, zing, and sting”: initial outreach, emotional manipulation, and finally, the money or data extraction.
But the story isn’t only about detection and takedown. Stubbs highlighted that millions of people now use ChatGPT to do precisely the opposite of what scammers intend: to identify and avoid fraud. In fact, he noted, there are three times more scam-detection interactions with ChatGPT than there are attempts by scammers to misuse it.
“AI needs to be part of the solution, not just part of the problem,” he said. “Using these technologies to provide everyone with an accessible, easy to use, reliable tool that they can have in their pocket and pull out whenever they need it to check whether something is a scam will do far more to prevent harm than any amount of scammers that we can detect and ban from our products.”
That vision—AI as a civic safety tool—anchors OpenAI’s broader anti-scam work. Just last week, the company announced a new multi-year collaboration with Older Adults Technology Services (OATS) from AARP through the OpenAI Academy, expanding nationwide training to help seniors use AI safely and confidently. The program includes an updated Older Adults Guide to AI, new privacy courses, and a short educational video demonstrating how to use ChatGPT as what Stubbs described as a “second pair of eyes” to spot scams. Together with OATS, OpenAI aims to make AI literacy and safety accessible to everyone, at every age.
Stubbs also emphasized that transparency and partnership are central to this effort. His team regularly contributes to OpenAI’s public threat reports, which detail how malicious actors misuse AI—an approach that embraces transparency and builds public trust in how AI is developed and deployed.
“No single company, no single organization, can meaningfully tackle this alone,” he said. “We partner with consumer safety groups to educate vulnerable communities, and we collaborate with different tech companies and anti-scam organisations to disrupt networks across the internet.”
Stubbs began his career as a journalist, but sees deeper purpose behind his work at OpenAI.
“Every day we're basically making life harder for people that are clearly acting in bad faith to try and use these technologies to do objectively harmful things,” he said. That's definitely a large part of what I enjoy about the job, and I know that's the same for my colleagues as well.”
Watch the full conversation on the OpenAI Forum website here. And tune in on October 7th for a special event featuring CNN’s Jim Sciutto and OpenAI’s Ben Nimmo, one of the world’s leading experts on digital threats. 
