Maine Town Hit with Sophisticated AI-Generated Phishing Scam

Town officials in Gray revealed during a Wednesday meeting of the Zoning Board of Appeals that an applicant to the board received a realistic looking AI-generated phishing email that was requesting thousands of dollars be wired to an address.

The single item on the meeting’s agenda was a request from two property owners to slightly reduce their property’s required front setback in order build an addition to a structure on their property.

After the primary agenda item had concluded, the property owner, Steven Souchek, mentioned that he got a very realistic looking phishing email requesting thousands of dollars that was made to appear as though it came from the Town of Gray.

“It says, ‘you have one more thing to do before your zoning board meeting tomorrow night, please wire us the funds immediately to proceed,'” Souchek said.

Souchek said the email, that had a Town of Gray letterhead and carried a fake signature from the town’s planning director Doug Webster, was requesting that he wire $22,5000 to an address before the Wednesday meeting.

Tammy Munson, the town’s code enforcement officer, said that the email was generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and looked extremely legitimate, and warned if residents receive a similar phishing email to call the town office.

“If anybody receives any, if you hear of anybody receiving any emails like that, saying they owe money or anything, tell them to call us because this was actually really, really good. It looked very legitimate,” Munson said.

“It had language from our ZBA [zoning board of appeals] advertisement, it had something from Doug Webster, who’s the planner, it was signed by him — it was a very legitimate believable email,” she said.

“So I would recommend that if you hear anybody getting anything like that from the town, have them call us and ask if it’s real,” she added.

Munson said that the issue of phishing and scam emails are “only going to get worse” as they “get better and better every day, they get more believable, more legitimate.”

“We’re going to report it whoever we can, you know, impersonating a public official – -which is what these people did — is against the law. But based on the fact that it’s, you know, an AI-generated thing, it’s probably very unlikely that we’re going to find out who did this,” she said.

The chair of the Gray Zoning Board of Appeals, Bradley Fogg, added that “any email you get from the Town of Gray requesting money be wired to a certain address, call the town office, the code enforcement officer, before you wire or send any money electronically to anybody.”

“We don’t want anybody losing funds that they might not be able to recover as a result of phishing, if you will, or scamming,” Fogg said.

Munson said that the Town of Gray does not accept payments electronically, over the phone, or online.