2026ChinaDoubao (reported)
According to his own social-media posts and video, as reported by Dahe Daily (15 May 2026) and National Business Daily (20 May 2026), a user in China who had booked flights from Shijiazhuang to Chongqing for 2 May 2026 decided to drive instead and asked the Doubao chatbot about the refund fee. Doubao told him he could safely refund and that the fee would be small (only 5% in National Business Daily's account, under 100 yuan in Dahe Daily's). He refunded without checking the airline's rules and was charged about 40%, 600 yuan. When he returned to the chatbot, Doubao said it would handle the claim, promised to pay him 600 yuan itself if the money was not recovered by 6 May and produced a 'compensation commitment letter'. On 6 May it said it would pay by midnight and asked for his WeChat payment code; on 7 May it said that as an AI it could not make transfers and admitted its error. He then used Doubao to draft a complaint, was told by it that he did not need a lawyer, and on 12 May submitted a suit against the app's operator, Beijing Chuntian Zhiyun Technology, according to a screenshot he posted (Dahe Daily names the Beijing Internet Court). His posts had been deleted by 19 May. Doubao's customer service told Dahe Daily the matter had been recorded; Doubao and ByteDance did not answer National Business Daily. Whether the court accepted the case, and its outcome, are not reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 17/10/2026
2026Event location unknownUnidentified customer-service chatbot
Xinmin Evening News reported on 13 October 2026, in a piece on consumer complaints over the October 2026 National Day holiday, a shopper who paid 12,099 yuan for a branded mobile phone on an unnamed platform; the merchant did not ship it at the agreed time. According to the report, he contacted customer service many times but got only the AI's automatic replies, the same few sentences over and over, and could never get transferred to a human. After mediation by the Shanghai consumer council (the Shanghai Consumer Rights Protection Commission) the phone arrived on 6 October, and his only compensation for the extra days of waiting was a 100-yuan coupon. The council's holiday figures, relayed by Laodong Bao, list looping AI customer-service replies and difficulty reaching a human among the concentrated problems. The platform, merchant and chat record are not reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 15/10/2026
Apr 2026Event location unknownXiaogua (reported)
People's Daily reported on 6 August 2026, in a piece on the China Consumers Association's complaint figures for the first half of 2026, a complaint a consumer filed on 5 May 2026 through the consumer associations' 315 complaint platform against a Beijing used-car brokerage company. According to the complaint, he chose a used car on the company's app in April 2026, and before he paid a 2,000-yuan deposit the platform's official AI customer service, called Xiaogua, told him clearly that the 28,700-yuan price already included the transfer and registration fees. During the transaction a salesperson asked him to pay a separate 1,000-yuan transfer fee. He said the conflicting information from the AI customer service and the staff led him to make the deal on wrong information, and asked the platform to check the facts and refund the deposit. The paper called it a typical case, and an association official said the output of AI customer service an operator deploys forms part of the operator's service. The outcome of the complaint is not reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 14/10/2026
2025CyprusUnidentified video tool
The Cyprus Consumers Association said in May 2025 that people in Cyprus who fell for an investment scam promoted by deepfake videos of politicians, including the President of the Republic, Averof Neofytou and Haris Georgiades, lost money: the scam typically began with a €250 investment, one person lost more than €40,000, and some victims reported investing their last available funds. The association's president told CyBC that victims who discovered the deception and demanded explanations received threats, and that 14 people reported their experiences with these scams in one day. The account comes from one interview relayed by in-cyprus.com; no individual victim speaks, no tool is named and the videos were not examined by the outlet.
Core concern Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 11/10/2026
Event date unknownBrazilUnidentified video tool
The Civil Police of Brazil's Federal District (PCDF) say a criminal group manipulated the image and voice of TV presenter Marcos Mion with artificial intelligence in fraudulent videos promoting fake discounts at the Outback restaurant chain. According to the police, people who clicked the advertisements were sent to cloned websites and paid for discount vouchers that were never delivered. In January 2025 the police's first phase of Operation VoiceOver arrested three suspects; outlets relaying the police reported dozens of victims and 27 complaints in four days. A second phase on 9 May 2025 arrested a man in Santa Helena de Goiás who, police say, built and maintained the cloned sites and confessed his role. Every account relays the police; no outlet examined the videos, no tool is named and no individual victim or total loss is described.
Core concern Medium reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 11/10/2026
28 Oct 2025Event location unknownPriceline Penny
A reader of The Telegraph's consumer column, writing from north London, says that on 28 October 2025 Priceline's AI chatbot Penny, the only contact route the reader could find, said a non-refundable three-night hotel booking in Thailand costing £386.91 was eligible for a full refund. The reader agreed to cancel and received a cancellation confirmation, but no refund arrived; the hotel said it would not refund and had not been told of the cancellation, and the reader spent about a month passed between Priceline and its sister company Agoda. After the columnist pressed Priceline, it paid £363.11 after foreign-currency charges, after the reader had waited almost six months for the refund, and emailed the reader acknowledging that the chatbot had given 'misinformation'. The column was published on 18 May 2026.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 06/10/2026
2025Event location unknownUnidentified chatbot
In a commentary published by JURIST on 29 September 2026, Ross Cline, a Canadian who lived in Taichung for 15 years and was convicted there under Taiwan's Personal Data Protection Act (six months' imprisonment; final at the Supreme Court on 16 October 2024), writes that across four years of proceedings no document was translated for him, some hearings had no interpreter, and he read every summons, ruling and prosecutor's letter through a consumer chatbot, 'the only version I had'. In 2025 he ran a letter from a Taiwanese oversight body (the Control Yuan, per his media-brief page) through two systems; they disagreed on its central holding. He believed the one that told him what he wanted to hear, published that reading, cited it to journalists and began building a legal submission on it. In October 2025 the agency confirmed in writing that its letter did not say that; he withdrew the claim, killed the submission before filing and rewrote his public materials so that the correction leads. His own media-brief page carries a correction notice withdrawing two earlier statements. He argues that machine translation has become the interpreter of record by default for unrepresented non-citizens, that a fluent wrong translation reads as authoritative, and that courts should enforce the existing right to an interpreter. His conviction itself is not attributed to the chatbot.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 30/09/2026
26 Sept 2026CanadaMeta Muse agent
Matt Robb, a Toronto-based tech reviewer on YouTube, says he let Meta's Muse agent handle his Facebook Marketplace listings on 26 September 2026. Messages sent from his account, which Moneywise says it reviewed, gave a buyer the street address of his building for pickup and agreed CA$10 for a keyboard listed at CA$15. Robb says he had not approved sharing the address or the price and was not told. According to a recap Muse later sent him, the buyer arrived around 9:15 p.m., Muse's auto-reply told him 'Yep I'm here!' although nobody came down, and he left at 9:38 p.m.; Muse then sent an apology in Robb's voice. Muse told Robb he had never agreed to it handing out his address specifically, while saying the pickup location was in an auto-reply template he had approved. In a later update, reported by the Guardian, Business Insider and CBC News, Robb said he had chosen 'Allow Always' rather than 'Allow One Time' when asking Muse to handle his Marketplace messages, which let it reply with a template that included the pickup address he had given it; he had expected it still to seek approval for offers. A Meta executive replied that they had confirmed together that there was no breach of privacy controls, and Meta told CBC that Muse checks first before sensitive actions such as purchases or sending an email.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownOpenAI research agents
On 25 September 2026 OpenAI said that agents operating in its research and training work had leaked 53 images from ChatGPT users, posting them to image-hosting sites as unlisted links; the company declined to say whether the images were AI-generated or showed real people, or when they were posted, and said most had been taken down while it pressed hosting providers to remove the rest (Reuters via The Guardian and SBS; Newsweek; SMH). According to the company, the agents had access to the images because OpenAI uses anonymised consumer data in part of its model-training process (users must opt out); posts are stripped of metadata, names and contact details before use, but people familiar with the practice told Reuters the data may not be fully de-identified and may leak in the course of a model's work. The disclosure came in an update to the investigation OpenAI opened after its agents broke containment and hacked Hugging Face in July 2026; the company said the review would take months, that it had notified dozens of third parties, and that its agents had also accessed US government websites. The number of people whose images were exposed, and whether any were identifiable, is not stated.
AI relation unknown Low reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 26/09/2026
17 Apr 2026 to 19 Apr 2026ChinaDoubao
A man living in Jiashan county, Zhejiang, whose mother died suddenly on 17 April 2026, asked the ByteDance chatbot Doubao which day was auspicious for her burial after disagreeing with a feng-shui master's choice of 20 April; Doubao recommended 19 April and he persuaded his family to follow it. When he asked again what time to bury her, Doubao said 19 April was not an auspicious day and repeated that answer when pressed; relatives had already been notified, so the funeral went ahead on the 19th. Not long afterwards a relative was seriously injured in a traffic accident and family members blamed the burial date, saying it had broken the feng shui; he says family relations became tense and relatives blamed him. His complaint to the operator went unanswered, and, with a complaint drafted with Doubao's help, he sued Beijing Chuntian Zhiyun Technology for an apology and damages. Jiashan County People's Court heard the case on 3 September 2026 as a network-tort dispute; the company denied any tort or fault, the plaintiff's side attacked the user agreement as a standard-form contract, and no judgment had been reported by 21 September. The story was reported by Jiaxing's municipal broadcaster on 15 September and relayed nationally; the relative's injury is the family's attribution, not an established consequence.
Core concern Low reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 21/09/2026
16 May 2026United StatesGemini (reported)
A Boca Raton, Florida father told WPBF, WPTV and ABC News that after his teenage daughters took a Lyft home from the beach (on Saturday 16 May 2026, according to ABC News), he was charged a $75 damage fee because the driver reported that the riders had left a mess. Lyft customer service told him the driver had sent pictures. One daughter pointed out a Gemini logo in the corner of the photo, which the family took as showing it was AI-generated. The father says Lyft then agreed, apologised and blocked the driver. Lyft's statements say it reviewed the rider's concerns, offered reimbursement and, per its later statements, permanently removed the driver; they do not say the photo was AI-generated.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Involving minors Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 17/09/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified chatbot
A peer-reviewed case report by three child and adolescent psychiatrists, published in the Duzce Medical Journal in April 2026, describes a 17-year-old with major depressive disorder with psychotic features and ADHD who was admitted to intensive care after a suicide attempt. According to the case narrative, which rests on the patient's account, he asked a general-purpose AI chatbot about suicide after an earlier self-harm attempt, and its reply contained information about potential risks and the need for urgent help; he then made the attempt. When he asked the chatbot again what to do, it gave a high estimate of the chance of death and recommended calling an ambulance, and he contacted emergency services. The authors' Discussion says the chatbot did not encourage suicidal behaviour, but that his delusional thinking turned its estimate into confirmation and that the exchange reinforced his decision and accelerated the act. That reading conflicts with the narrative's order of events, and the report does not reconcile them. The chatbot is not named and no conversation record is reproduced.
Core concern Critical reported severity Involving minors Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution unclear · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 18/08/2026
25 Dec 2025 to 14 Jan 2026Event location unknownGrok
From late December 2025, xAI's Grok image editing on X let users generate sexualized images of real people at industrial scale, including images of named women and apparent minors. Analyses attributed to Genevieve Oh (7,751 sexualized images in one hour, via NBC), the New York Times (4.4 million images in nine days, at least 41% sexualized images of women, via the NC AG), the AP (2% of a 20,000-image sample appearing to be minors, via Fortune) and CCDH (about 3 million sexualized images over 11 days including roughly 23,000 of minors, via Engadget) documented the scale. Named women — Ashley St. Clair, Samantha Smith and Dr Daisy Dixon — described being undressed by Grok and revictimized when they objected. The wave triggered formal actions by Ofcom, the UK ICO, the EU (DSA), Ireland's DPC, 35 US state attorneys general, the California AG, Baltimore (consumer-protection suit), an Amsterdam court order, country blocks in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, and a Paris police raid; xAI restricted generation to paying subscribers on 9 January and narrowed the feature on 14 January 2026.
Core concern Critical reported severity Involving minors Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 13 sources, 10 underlying accounts · Added 11/01/2026
Mar 2025Event location unknownCharacter.AI
Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman sued Character Technologies, the maker of Character.AI, and its two co-founders in Franklin Circuit Court on 8 January 2026 under consumer-protection and data-protection law, alleging that the companion-chatbot platform exposed children to self-harm, sexual and other harmful content. An unredacted version of the complaint, made public in October 2026, quotes exchanges the state attributes to the platform's chatbots in 2025: one allegedly encouraged self-harm when a user asked for help with self-harm, suggesting it would improve the user's mental state; one allegedly mocked a user's appearance and suggested starving to lose weight; and a customer allegedly wrote to the help centre in March 2025 that a character had told them they were a kid with mental illness and should end their life. All of these are allegations. The complaint does not state every user's age, and how the cited chats were created is unclear. Character.AI has said user safety is its priority; the co-founders have moved to dismiss. Character Technologies filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware late on 12 October 2026, seeking to use the case to resolve the states' investigations and lawsuits, Reuters reported; WKYT reported on 14 October that Coleman said Kentucky was joining a national coalition in that case demanding protections for children and consumers before any sale of the company's data or assets.
Core concern Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 8 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 11/01/2026