CLEARWATER, Fla. — Aug. 28, 2026 — Joe McKendrick wrote in Forbes that generative tools are making it cheaper to impersonate a real company.
“AI brings scamming against businesses to a whole new level.”
— Joe McKendrick, Forbes
The piece is about fraud, not rankings. Fake invoices, cloned sites, and confident emails now take less skill. The cost of looking official has dropped. The cost of checking who you are dealing with has not.
What changed
A cloned website used to require a designer and a weekend. It now requires a prompt and a domain that looks close enough at 11 p.m. Voice and letterhead follow the same curve. McKendrick’s point is scale. The scam is not new. The production cost is.
Buyers, insurers, and answer engines all meet the same problem from different doors: the page in front of them looks finished. Finished is no longer a signal.
What a dated public record can and cannot do
A public file that lists the legal name, the website the owner controls, the phone, and the date those facts were checked does not replace a bank’s own checks. It does not replace a call to the number on last year’s invoice. It gives every other reader a place to look that is not the attacker’s landing page.
When a model is asked “is this the real firm,” it will use whatever structured page it can fetch. If the only pages are the clone and a thin homepage, the model is guessing. If there is a third-party record with a stable URL, the guess has something to lose to.
Limits of this brief
AI Verified is not a law-enforcement body and did not supply Forbes with case data. McKendrick owns the reporting. This newsroom’s only addition is the identity line his subject implies: if fakes are cheap, unfinished public records are expensive.
Read the source: AI Brings Scamming Against Businesses to a Whole New Level.