Customer Tried to Scam LA Pizza Shop With AI Image
A pizza shop customer used AI to edit a photo of their pizza in a bid to get a refund — but it ultimately failed.
Masa in Echo Park, Los Angeles, is a popular neighborhood pizzeria renowned for its Chicago-style deep-dish pizzas.
KTLA reports that a DoorDash customer by the name of “Dani B” ordered a pizza from Masa but later demanded a full refund after Dani B sent a picture of a severely burnt pizza, claiming it was inedible.
The owner of the restaurant, Rhonda Reynolds, immediately suspected something was wrong. Masa says it takes great care over its quality control, and delivering a blackened pizza would simply never be allowed to happen.
Suspecting the customer had manipulated the image, Reynolds ran it through an app called “Is This AI” in an attempt to verify its authenticity. The program returned a 96 percent certainty that it was AI, citing “unnatural lighting effects on the pizza crust and inconsistent shadow directions within the pizza box.” The image doesn’t appear to contain a SynthID invisible watermark.
To be extra certain, Reynolds reviewed security footage taken inside the pizzeria, which captured the customer’s order being made in the kitchen. The footage showed that at the moment it was taken out of the oven and put into a delivery box, it did not appear to be burned at all.
“It’s the principle because it’s our reputation [being attacked] and it’s what we do here,” Reynolds tells KTLA.
“They went back and checked the footage,” says Jose Tapa, the employee who boxed the order. “The box clearly says the name of the person with the order number and [the pizza] was not what it was in their picture.”
A refund was initially sent to the scammer, but Reynolds successfully fought the claim and the refund was reversed.
Reynolds tells KTLA that this is the first time she’s ever encountered a scam involving AI tools. She worries that as AI tools become more advanced, small businesses like hers could increasingly fall victim to them and the scammers using them.
“We’ve been here 22 years and we’re considered a busy restaurant,” she adds. “It’s a struggle, that if this is a new frontier, we’re not gonna make it through to the other side if all of our time is spent [dealing with this]. So in that respect, it’s scary.”
Image creditsVia Masa Pizza Shop.
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