There is an emerg­ing trend of scam­mers claim­ing to rep­re­sent le­git­i­mate guest hous­es and of­fer­ing book­ings for tourists then pock­et­ing the mon­ey that is trans­ferred to them.

The lat­est scheme was ex­posed by ACP To­ba­go Os­wain Subero when he de­liv­ered re­marks at the launch of an Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence (AI) train­ing pro­gramme for 20 po­lice of­fi­cers at the To­ba­go Tech­nol­o­gy In­sti­tute yes­ter­day.

He warned vis­i­tors to ex­er­cise cau­tion when book­ing guest hous­es and ho­tel ac­com­mo­da­tions.

Subero said the train­ing pro­gramme, which was ini­ti­at­ed in part­ner­ship with To­ba­go’s Jade Mon­key Bar and GNC Labs, was valu­able in sen­si­tis­ing of­fi­cers about the dan­gers of AI gen­er­at­ed im­ages, videos and oth­er fea­tures which can be used to de­ceive the pub­lic.

He said the guest house scam is an ex­am­ple of how re­source­ful crim­i­nals had be­come to find new vic­tims us­ing tech­nol­o­gy.

“One of our chal­lenges we have recog­nised is the is­sue of iden­ti­fy­ing what is re­al and what is not re­al,” he said.

“We are in a space where tourism is the main thrust in To­ba­go and per­sons are book­ing ho­tels they don’t own, be­ing paid for spaces that they don’t own and peo­ple are ar­riv­ing at guest hous­es on­ly to re­alise that the per­son they paid has no af­fil­i­a­tion with the ho­tels.”

Subero said at least five peo­ple have re­port­ed be­ing scammed.

Re­fer­ring to the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) 2025–2027 op­er­a­tional plan which was in­tro­duced ear­li­er this year, Subero said the po­lice al­so had a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to in­cor­po­rate tech­nol­o­gy in their an­ti-crime plans.

He said there were plans to in­tro­duce a To­ba­go edi­tion of the Ea­gle Eye project (Cit­i­zen Se­cu­ri­ty Net­work), which used an in­te­grat­ed CCTV sys­tem where mul­ti­ple se­cu­ri­ty cam­eras were fed to a po­lice com­mand cen­tre.

Subero said this ini­tia­tive would not on­ly en­hance re­sponse times of of­fi­cers, but re­duce the need for “eye­ball” wit­ness­es to crimes who might be hes­i­tant to come for­ward and re­port what they ob­served.

To­ba­go Ho­tel and Tourism As­so­ci­a­tion (THAT) Regi­nald MacLean did not re­spond to ques­tions on the is­sue up to press time.

On the is­sue of AI as a po­ten­tial weapon for crim­i­nals, head of the To­ba­go Di­vi­sion Snr Supt Earl Elie said it was some­thing the po­lice should be par­tic­u­lar­ly aware of and he laud­ed the TTPS and pri­vate sec­tor part­ners for the train­ing ses­sion.

Elie said the po­lice should not be left be­hind in recog­nis­ing and coun­ter­ing these threats.

“We see the need ba­si­cal­ly for us to be pre­pared even more than we are to treat with it. We see the preva­lence of deep-fake videos and we know the im­pact that can have on the pub­lic in terms of cre­at­ing neg­a­tive im­ages of per­sons, spread­ing bad in­for­ma­tion or neg­a­tive in­for­ma­tion, so what it does for us is it tells us we need to be more care­ful in form­ing con­clu­sions and mak­ing fi­nal de­ci­sions.” —Shane Su­perville