'It's organized crime': TikTok Shop says it's fighting a new wave of AI scammers (www.businessinsider.com)

TikTok Shop warns that fraudsters are increasingly using generative AI to fabricate brands, write convincing listings and produce dupes—sometimes as part of organized schemes that take payment and never deliver. Nicolas Waldmann, who leads governance for TikTok Shop, says the company is responding with a hybrid approach: human reviewers plus in‑house AI detection tools and partnerships with outside firms (for example, authenticating pre‑owned luxury items). In the first half of 2025 TikTok reports rejecting 70 million products and removing 700,000 sellers, underscoring both the scale of the problem and the high commercial stakes as the platform chases ambitious e‑commerce growth (it drove $100M in single‑day US sales on Black Friday). The announcement highlights an escalating arms race in marketplace security: generative models let bad actors produce realistic, high‑volume, adversarial content that can evade automated filters, forcing platforms to build more sophisticated detection, provenance and verification systems and combine them with human judgment. That shift raises operational challenges—scaling moderation, reducing false positives that frustrate legitimate sellers, and coordinating cross‑platform defenses—while underscoring broader implications for trust, fraud prevention and regulatory scrutiny in AI‑driven commerce.