Scammers are using artificial intelligence to sound more like family members in distress. People are falling for it and losing thousands of dollars.

OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT, has ramped up its hiring around the world, bringing on roughly 1,000 remote contractors over the past six months in regions like Latin America and Eastern Europe, according to people familiar with the matter.

About 60% of the contractors were hired to do what’s called “data labeling” — creating massive sets of images, audio clips, and other information that can then be used to train artificial intelligence tools