COLUMBIA — The Boone County Sheriff’s Office Cybercrime Taskforce is focusing its approach to cybercrimes through its evolution.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Report released earlier this year says that from 2024-2025, the Internet Crime Complaint Center saw a 15 percent increase in cybercrime complaints involving everything from cryptocurrency to AI.
Boone County Sheriff’s Office cybercrime task force is feeling the brunt of this statistic as they refocus their approach tackling AI.
“We just have to get ourselves more updated in awareness of what the newer scams involving A.I. are out there and help educate our deputies,” said Detective Traci Perkins, one of the first members of the Boone County Sheriff’s Department’s cybercrime task force.
She’s witnessed the rise of cybercrime over almost two decades.
“Technology obviously didn’t really start booming until about 2009, 2010. That’s when I saw a really big influx in social media, and that’s when Facebook and all the other big tech companies started piling in, and then it just started getting out of control from there,” said Perkins.
The technology is getting more sophisticated too.
Boone County’s cybercrimes unit is investigating the recent AI ransom scam using deepfake technology.
According to detectives, the technology mimicked the voice of a Columbia woman’s daughter — claiming to have been kidnapped.
When the woman was directed to pay a ransom, she called authorities instead.
This unit is trying to stay ahead of a growing number of similar deepfake scams.
“We knew that these AI phone calls would exist, and the voice would portray a family member. We knew that it was going to happen. We already knew about the videos and the deepfakes. We know that there are always those AI phishing scams out there, but the voice cloning is a real concern,” said Perkins.
Another cybercrime focus is child sexual abuse material.
Perkins says there are 60-80 million images and videos circulating.
She specializes in the matter and says a growing number of cybercriminals are using AI to curate the content.
“That is both AI and actual pictures and images and video files…That’s a lot. Obviously, we want those numbers to stop,” said Perkins.
Perkins will string together bits and pieces of each incident to pinpoint identities and lead to an arrest.
“We have websites, and we have different resources that we can seek out to help identify particular information that was before them in that investigation. So, it’s basically more of a proactive and a reactive approach,” said Perkins.
Perkins added that there are still no leads in the initial ransom call from last week.
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