AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
Comments
madradavid
gambiting
>>no one is forced into these things,
I was with you until then - hasn't it been documented over and over again that at least in some of these places people are basically slaves, they have their passports taken away, kept in a walled compound and not allowed to leave?
cheriot
While he was still living on his own, my grandfather struggled with people sending him scam letters in the mail. He sent a meaningful amount of money to obvious scams despite being a shrewd businessman all his life. AI will take these cons to another level.
Is there any way to help the elderly navigate this shift?
aenis
The advice I gave to my folks -- hard ignore any contact attempts not initiated by them. Dont read, dont answer the phone except from recognized numbers. I think thats the only way. No legitimate businesses call or text people out of the blue these days.
I dont believe in AI voice assistants picking up phones and filtering scammers. Those tbings will fight a losing game considering how the mainstream LLMs are built.
gambiting
It would be great if not for the fact that at least over here in the UK your doctor or anyone from the NHS will always call you from a restricted number. So especially if you're elderly and have regular check ups or anything medical going on, the advice to "only answer known numbers" falls apart. And in my experience NHS receptionists have zero patience for the whole "tell me why you're calling" automated screens too, they just disconnect straight away.
userbinator
Is there any way to help the elderly navigate this shift?
"Ignore anyone asking you for money unless you know them and they do it in-person."
mrheosuper
Easier said than done. One of most popular scam here is a scammer using deepfake/ai calling victim saying there was serious accident to one of victim's relative and they need money for hospital (that's how it works here, money for proper caring). The victim would be panic and send the money.
Usually, the scammer will think of a scenario that give the victim very limited time to stop and think, or put them in the state that fear takes over their mind
UqWBcuFx6NV4r
That is completely impractical for most people.
BLKNSLVR
Say what?!
It sounds extremely obvious and infinitely practical.
How often are you (or your parents) legitimately asked for money via email / internet? I mean, my answer is: never. My parents' answer is: never. My parents-in-law answer is: never.
normie3000
Great if that works for you.
Asking for money is common over voice or whatsapp in some countries for things like medical care, funerals, weddings, police "fines", school fees etc.
BLKNSLVR
Yeah, fair point, it's pretty well outside normal for me (there's a world outside of my lived experience? Nah!)
infamouscow
The scam is usually a phone call from a loved one in jail or the hospital. It immediately creates a sense of panic and fully explains the random phone number. The voice doesn't have to sound like you either.
userbinator
This is where "security questions" can be useful; neither the question nor answer need to be real, and the more outrageous the better.
"You're my daughter? Then tell me the name of your twelth pet centipede."
dosisking
I use "Queen to queen's level 3" and then wait for the appropriate response.
tty456
Why?
3RTB297
Honestly, not really. The problem is that often the scams are symptoms of a larger problem.
The elderly still want autonomy, and the scams adapt and change faster than education can get most of the elderly caught up to the risks. That's entirely removed from the technical aspects, which are a whole other level of education on risk. Scams always will move faster than defenders and efforts to block them.
All of which are divorced from the real problem, which is isolation of the elderly. The elderly often jump in to these scams simply because they just want someone to chat with. Many romance scammers will report that all they do is strike up a conversation with people, and quite often that's all it takes to get in deeper on an emotional level than the victim's entire family. The family treats this like a money problem, when it's an emotional gap the scammer is exploiting.
I had a neighbor once who was so poor her gas got turned off. Blind due to diabetes. Still managed to send half her meager social security check to a televangelist, because the televangelist was on TV in her face all day, and her family visited once a month. The elderly were prime candidates for 1-900 psychic numbers for decades because it was someone to talk to. I imagine your grandfather wanted to feel like he was helping someone, and scam letters gave him a perfect way to convince himself he was doing exactly that.
hnav
so the solution in this brave new world is to preemptively fill the gap with benevolent chatbot penpals?
newman8r
I assume AI assistants would be able to prevent a lot of this
aenis
I dont think so. The LLMs are trained to play it safe and avoid responsibility for hard decisions. No commercial model will say "No, I wont connect your call, I dont think you are bleeding to death at this moment, I believe you are a scammer". Nope.
HDBaseT
It's an intriguing idea, but prompt injection and misleading the AI seem like fairly trivial things to do right?
restlessforge
I'm surprised it's only half
There's a joke about certain princes here but I just feel bad for the people getting scammed since I know firsthand how realistic these things can seem
paganel
> since I know firsthand how realistic these things can seem
Happened to a person close to me a few months ago and, indeed, it has become uncannily realistic. I'm surprised it hasn't attracted the attention of the relevant authorities, because harmless people are now being scammed of their live savings (or worse, in the case of the person close to me she had actually borrowed the sum she was scammed of) and no-one seems to be doing anything. It's also highly regressive, as in it seems to affect the people that would most need that money (in a way it's similar to how gambling affects the lower classes a lot more compared to the wealthy).
karim79
Here's an amazing study from Microsoft which I recall from back in the day (PDF):
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Edit: Recalled -> Recall
Nition
This paper is the one and only source for every claim from the past 10 years that "scammers make mistakes in scams on purpose." Crucially, no actual scammer or former scammer or even acquaintance of a former scammer has ever corroborated it. The paper itself is pure speculation.
If anything I think that paper serves best as a reminder that just because an idea is clever and logical, that doesn't necessarily mean it's true.[1]
[1] As another example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
karim79
No. The paper is about reducing a set, as far as I understand. It's not about mistakes. It's about the deliberacy of basically squeezing out the individuals who are vulnerable and who do not see the signs of being scammed.
Nition
Yes but ascribing those motivations is a guess. There's no actual scammer saying they are doing that vs. it just being a fairly unsophisticated scam. It might be the reason, but the paper provides no actual proof, and as far as I've been able to find, neither has anyone else in the decade since. Just a whole lot of people repeating the theory as fact.
karim79
I'll take your point and rabbit hole it a bit sir.
Nition
If you find actual proof - even a friend of a friend saying they once heard it from a real scammer - I'd love to see it.
karim79
I used to bait 419 scammers. Weirdly enough I actually befriended a couple of them. That was about 20 years ago. They were full on and shameless but when exposed they became more human and even sympathetic and I dropped my guard and told them what I was doing.
One of them said, and I'll never forget, "Thank you for being reasonable".
MisterTea
I had a friend who had a similar experience with a dating site scammer. The guy dropped the act and admitted he was operating out of Africa (I forget the country) and was not proud of what he was doing but did so out of desperation. He told my friend of his living situation, rampant poverty of his country and little to no hope of a future. That small conversation stuck with my friend.
karim79
The stuff does stick because it's literally connecting with humans who are hard done by and it's always affecting. It's really sad.
Jach
It's more sad to me that it's usually just a second layer to the scam. People's empathy can be exploited just as easily if not more so than their intellect.
cheriot
> By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.
There's less need to identify the most gullible when AI drops the incremental cost of responding closer to zero.
wolvoleo
And, it also allows for more advanced, labour intensive, targeted styles of attacks to be leveled at targets much less promising.
gerdesj
I had a bash with that paper. It is pure and utter tosh - I started with the ... start and swiftly moved to 6. Conclusion.
"Thinking like an attacker is a skill rightly valued among defenders."
and
"Attacking as a business must identify targets, and this is easy only if we believe that attackers have solved a problem that has vexed multiple communities for decades."
Bollocks!
karim79
How so? For me the point of the paper is the elimination of the ones who will not fall for such a scam in the first place. The title of the paper says it all.
Are we talking about the same thing?
edot
Bash = tried Tosh = nonsense Bollocks = also nonsense
karim79
Fair enough man. I didn't write the paper no need to hate on me sir.
Barbing
(Parent’s helpfully defining the Britishisms for HN readers)
karim79
As a British person I find this to be very very British.
edot
I like them, I just didn't understand them and figured I'd educate the crowd so we can all join in and call things tosh. Posh = fancy, tosh = bad.
Barbing
Sorry were they Englishisms or something, almost clarified I didn’t know!
usernametaken29
Coincidentally it’s also the biggest scam in the west. Wait till the IPO and the inevitable 80% stock drop of OpenAI ….
ProllyInfamous
When the majority of a decades-long-scams' victims are Boomers getting hacked with AIs (clearing out your possibly-lesser inheritances)... does it still matter if the /u/usernametake29s of this world are still stuck thinking LLMs are "a scam" ? Still?
----
This thought-provoker is 100% human-derived.
#They'reMadeOutOfWeights
----
I didn't even realize how serious I was being, back in late 2022, when I was telling my Boomer friends (twice my age, but still closer than most "family") "make sure if you're grand-daugther calls 'begging for her life,' you need to ask the kidnappers something only she would know – and then *you can never ask that same question again (for verification, at least; ask whatever you want).
We are here.
spiderfarmer
If someone who is as unpopular as Elon the cringelord Musk can convince the markets that Tesla is worth its current stock price, I doubt the AI bubble will burst.
cortesoft
People buying shares at a given price does not necessarily mean they believe the company is worth that much
Barbing
Can a person get their Roth IRA on a stoploss to make sure it’s everyone else left holding the bag? Asking for an antisocial friend
Ah with a decade or two time horizon it shouldn’t matter how hard it crashes if Zitron & Doctorow are proven right… rightttt!
grg0
"cringelord"
I cracked. Had never seen that used before, yet so obvious now in retrospect. Pure poetry.
SchemaLoad
It's already burst in South Korea when China showed they can make memory chips too. And it would have burst by now in the US if OpenAI and Anthropic were public.
Nition
The SK stock market is still up 55% since the start of this year.
BLKNSLVR
It is interesting looking at a long term chart how obvious that it was due for correction. Having said that, it's easy to say that after the correction because 'the top' is impossible to predict.
But if investors hadn't been taking profits on the incline, then I have little sympathy for them skiing down the decline.
(This is a harsh opinion, but people getting into investing should be doing it actively, not passively, ie. do some research, make a plan. Also, for those who are invested passively, long term, via ETFs, then they're still up 55% as @Nition says, so they're all good)
asdfman123
He can keep the scam going for a long time but not forever.
usernametaken29
Looking at SPCX it lost half of its valuation in a month and the trajectory is only heading downwards. Out of the three expedited IPO requests (OpenAI, SPCX, Anthropoid) to the S&P 500 only SPCX was approved. The other two did not fulfill expedited IPO requirements. To recap, the only AI company (xAI) going into the market lost half of its valuation in a month, and the other players are tooo dodgy to enter. When they will eventually, boy will you see the bubble pop
karim79
+1 for the word Cringelord. I have taken this and shall use it on my journeys.
underlipton
This is also why nothing will lower housing prices significantly. The problem isn't inventory, or that we're not subsidizing builders enough, or whatever. It's that we've decided that propping up housing values is more important than housing being affordable. And you cannot have both, full stop.
amazingamazing
It is only a matter of time until China can make everything needed for sub 8nm chips in their own country. Maybe 10 years away, but it is inevitable.
slig
Do you plan to bet on this by buying PUTs? Should be easy money, right? /s
ecshafer
Tesla is imo overvalued and has been for a long time. Its bankrupted a lot of pretty savvy investors in the last 10 years trying to short them because its obviously over valued. Market irrationality vs solvency and all of that.
thenewnewguy
While I agree with you in general, usernametaken29 made a specific prediction about OpenAI's IPO which is an event that will very likely happen in the next year or so.
That said, OpenAI isn't public, so you can't directly short it easily. I guess you could short Microsoft but I don't know if that gives you enough exposure to truly be worth it, even if you do genuinely believe what OOP claims.
jerf
IPOs experiencing significant drops after their IPO is not a crazy theory, it's pretty much the norm: https://potomacwealthmanagementllc.com/2026/03/04/underperfo...
Not guaranteed, but the norm.
I've never tried to buy PUTs on a big IPO but I wouldn't be surprised that there's a premium on them, if options trading is even available.
GolfPopper
Since no one else has said it, "The market can remain irrational longer that you can remain solvent."
amazingamazing
OpenAI isn’t public so… /s
merelydev
The main fuel is the internet , followed by mobile phones and social media.
AI definitely makes the scams more believable, a Nigerian Prince can now easily forge documents.
But at the same time AI is a double edged sword, it can be used for both offence and defense.
asdfman123
It's been used for defense for a long time. AI is why spam filters started actually working in the 2000s.
spydum
That was mostly Bayesian probability filters, followed by SPF and more recently DKIM.. Maybe you could consider the Bayesian filter databases being trained as ML, but I feel it's a far way from our typical AI/LLM surge
dosisking
> but I feel it's a far way from our typical AI/LLM surge
I think they are about the same.
Both work about as well as autocorrect
TremendousJudge
less than 10 years ago I worked for an AI company that sold Naive Bayes classifiers as a service. so I would call it AI
PunchyHamster
different kind of AI
kazinator
Not really, though. Sequences of tokens are predicted as {spam, not spam} via training on pair sets. It's like a token predictor where the output vocabulary is two tokens.
Dylan16807
The complete inability to use it to generate spam doesn't make it different to you?
kazinator
Well, I just said that. Since what is predicated is one of two tokens <is-spam>, <is-not-spam>. Since spam is not made out of those tokens, it doesn't generate spam.
(Even spam could be encoded into those two tokens via binary or whatever, it still wouldn't because it's predicting a classification, and not the next sybmol; i.e. not simply the next bit in a after a string prefix, but a 0 or 1 value indicating whether the bit string is spam, which comes from an asserted external judgment.)
It's all the same sort of thing though: some functions trained to predict a value associated with an input.
Nathanba
That's like calling stones fuel for violence. It's everyone's choice what they use the internet or stones for.
grg0
With all the Nigerian princes out there, you'd think one of the bastards would have already made an official claim to the throne.
cyanydeez
the point though of a proper scam is to filter out the believables and find the guillibles.
You don't exactly want convincing evidence; you want a good story.
im3w1l
I think you are taking that line of reasoning a little too far. The point of a scam is to trick people out of their belongings. There may be certain advantages of targeting and filtering for gullible people, but it's not the point itself.
LocalH
The main fuel is the "need" to have browsers that can execute code, coupled with the ability to transfer money via the internet. JavaScript was a mistake, e-commerce was a mistake, and so is everything else that came after.
Let's ask Vint Cerf whether the web was meant to run logic, or just be a document format. I bet no matter what he answers, the world would be like the GIF pronunciation "I don't care if the original creator said it's pronounced like giraffe, I'm gonna say it like gift because I KnOw BeTtEr"
Internet 3 when (because I know that academia does already have an "Internet 2", although I bet due to Internet 1 security issues, Internet 2 is already compromised too)
stingraycharles
> JavaScript was a mistake, e-commerce was a mistake, and so is everything else that came after.
That’s a really extreme take that lacks any nuance.
Might as well blame the OS as well for allowing any custom code to be executed.
jameshart
Douglas Adams put the source of the rot a bit further back:
> This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.
Dylan16807
> browsers that can execute code, coupled with the ability to transfer money via the internet
But those are completely unrelated topics. You don't need a hint of JavaScript to do online banking.
And you don't need online banking to send someone your credit card details or banking information. Any kind of communication can turn into a scam. You can steal money over the phone or by mail.
antonvs
Itym Tim Berners-Lee, not Vint Cerf.
Tim invented the web: HTML, HTTP, URLs.
Vint did a lot of things, but most of it had to do with lower-level internet infrastructure, not the web per se.
cyberax
The first Nigerian Prince scams started over email.
krisoft
Mayhaps. But Spanish prisoner letters were known much before that. Which is basically the same advance fee scam but with a different cover story.
Here is a story which describes one such letter from 1913: https://web.archive.org/web/20020815055745/http://www.samizd...
jamiek88
Snail mail scams like that were common for decades prior. My mates dad nearly fell for one once.
motbus3
Criminals are bad, evil, jail etc etc. I agree. But while the core problem that creates this environment is not solved, nothing will fix it. Not even if you bomb the hell out of it.
Ethics, morals and whatever people call only exists if economy is stable. If you let this sort of opportunistic environment exist there will be people to work in it
tgv
> Ethics, morals and whatever people call only exists if economy is stable.
Dire economic conditions increase crime, that much seems true, but as long as it is profitable, there will be crime, under all economic conditions. It is, as you say, opportunism.
bloppe
It's kinda hard to have a truly informed conversation about the scam industry since it's so secretive, but many of the scammers in Myanmar are actually incredibly big businesses that basically enslave people who otherwise wouldn't scam anybody. In those cases, the people who are actually making the choices are incredibly wealthy.
ElProlactin
> Ethics, morals and whatever people call only exists if economy is stable.
What is a "stable" economy? The US has the world's largest GDP, the highest nominal GDP per capita of any nation with a population over 10 million, the highest amount of investable and liquid private assets of any country in the world, more than a third of the world's millionaires, etc.
And yet I think you'd have a hard time convincing most people that the US is a bastion of ethics and morals.
gpt5
Poor countries have a significantly higher rate of corruption, which means that the government itself is part of the crime syndications.
It is true that we see correlation between richer countries and lower level of crimes - across all layers of society.
Jach
There is a correlation, though it can be weak (see for within-the-US: low-income parts in Appalachia). But even if it was as strong as, say, the correlations with IQ and Big-5-trait Conscientiousness on various life outcomes, it would still be factually wrong to state something as absolute as: "Ethics, morals and whatever people call only exists if economy is stable."
ElProlactin
This really depends on how you define corruption.
Rich countries have created a definition that makes it a poor country thing, conveniently ignoring the type of corruption that is institutionalized (and in some cases even legalized) in many rich countries.
cjbgkagh
The point of institutionalizing corruption is to reduce competition from competing corruption entities. Which is bad but not as bad as an endemically corrupt society.
I think it can be true that we have in effect far more corruption in the west than what is readily recognized at the same time that it’s true that we have less corruption than most other countries.
keybored
But that’s the beautiful thing. The system working as the law, regulations, etc. dictates is by definition not corruption! No wonder the upper middle class and richer segments hate corruption. (Not all of them. The Rule of Law kind of liberal certainly does.)
ElProlactin
> The point of institutionalizing corruption is to reduce competition from competing corruption entities. Which is bad but not as bad as an endemically corrupt society.
Do you even read what you write? If you institutionalize corruption to reduce competition between different corrupt factions, you end up with a not endemically corrupt society?
Here's what it actually means: if you institutionalize corruption, you end up with an endemically corrupt society that is incapable of even recognizing corruption for what it is.
> ...at the same time that it’s true that we have less corruption than most other countries.
No, the corruption is just more sophisticated so that we can pretend it isn't corruption. Just look at campaign finance. In many ways, it's even more insidious than companies handing over paper bags full of bribe money to politicians and government officials.
The amounts are bigger, the number of people who get a piece of the action is great and it's all "legal" so the corruption is more durable. And, again, everyone gets to pretend that it's not corruption.
Dylan16807
> endemically corrupt
Both options are endemically corrupt but removing most kinds of corruption is an improvement.
cjbgkagh
A society that pretends it is not corrupt is better than one that has given up on that pretense. No matter how bad you think things are it can always get worse. I am not looking forward to the coming free for all.
croes
I guess the difference is who pays and who has the economic power to pay.
In most western countries the corruption is mostly between entities with legal income, in poorer countries at least one side has its main income from illegal activities.
ElProlactin
> In most western countries the corruption is mostly between entities with legal income
Do you realize how much dirty money moves through and is laundered and stashed in the US? And how many billions of dollars a year in "legal" income financial institutions and other "legitimate" business entities, not to mention the US Treasury, collect from facilitating this?
scns
The current administration is giving them a run for the money. Might come out ahead in regards regards to corruption too. Number one.
cjbgkagh
I think what the Trump admin is doing is horribly corrupt and I hope the lot of them go to jail for that and other things, but in relative terms what Trump is doing is still less corrupt than what happens in many poor countries.
ElProlactin
> ...but in relative terms what Trump is doing is still less corrupt than what happens in many poor countries.
In relative terms?
So what you're saying is that Trump and his family grifting Americans for a couple billion dollars so far in his second term is better than, say, Hun Sen and his family grifting Cambodians for somewhere between $500 million and $4 billion over ~40 years because the US economy is so much bigger than Cambodia's?
cjbgkagh
I would measure by relative destruction of wealth since corruption is an inefficient destructive process that can quite often yield very little left to steal.
ElProlactin
The US, as I noted, is the wealthiest country in the world according to numerous metrics. Yet the median savings is only $8,000, the Brookings Institute found that "the overall share of middle-class households that do not make enough to afford basic necessities where they live ranges from 23% to 57%" and so on.
It is all but impossible to calculate how much wealth has been "destroyed" and, more importantly, how much wealth has been transferred from the middle class to the upper class by way of institutionalized corruption that many people, you included, won't even acknowledge as a form of corruption.
Meanwhile, members of Congress are laughing all the way to the bank.
__MatrixMan__
Does this analysis hold these each as just once instance of corruption?
- tamper with index fund rules so that the 401k's of the masses are bearing the risk of your risky investment
- bribe a border agent to let you through to see a friend
croes
I guess stable only really matters for companies because it makes the market more predictable. Crime organizations are often companies too, so they also benefit from stability. What makes crimes less is of you cut the market of foot soldiers, many want to be a drug lord, nobody wants to be the mule. So good income and social security for those shrinks the market of foot soldiers
But the US have a Gini coefficient of 0.418, so a high income equality
AIorNot
Same for global migrants issues..as long as people in dirt poor/war torn/unstable countries can watch tik toks of fat people dancing and crying about first world problems while they starve on the streets or deal with gangs and infrastructure issues we will have migrant problem.. we live in a hyperconnected world these days
Viewing the world as haves and have nots and building giant Walls and moats and hyper-capitalism alone will never solve this..
navs
Having run a small social media SaaS for a while, the amount of AI bots (and I say AI bots because the comments and direct messages sent by them definitely read like AI), was staggering.
I'm thankful for Cloudflare and I don't think I would have had the resources to deal with it any other way.
Helloworldboy
You’re on a social media site filled mostly with AI bots right now. Try saying something negative about China in any thread
croes
China is bad and Xi looks like Winnie the Pooh
Cider9986
Cybercrime is helped by the massive amount of static identifiers big tech and the internet uses and their refusal to shift away from them.
Privacy focused solutions prevent the leaks which enable many scammers, and yet governments respond by demanding more identifiers be added everywhere, which perpetuates the leaks. I've not gotten a single spam message on Signal with their phone number privacy settings and username usage. You can change your username whenever you want.
Google should add email aliasing and encourage it. They could detect and alert users if an email that comes to an alias is from a different sender than the first email to that alias.
aussieguy1234
Got a scam call yesterday morning. An American-ish accent, but quite rusty, I suspected they were using an AI voice changer.
They said "Am I speaking to <my full name>?". I did not answer that and instead asked what company they were calling from, then they immediately hung up.
I guess people who ask that initial question are disqualified for their scam, they're looking for more gullible folks.
karim79
I simply don't answer calls from unknown numbers. I feel like it's my right as a grown-up.
aenis
I never responded to an unknown or caller id hidden in 20 years. I am just fine, dont think I lost anything of value.
I also asked my parents and inlaws to adopt the same approach. Never pick up, never read any texts from unknown numbers. Those are all untrusted bytes.
abrowne
Agreed. If they really want to get ahold of me they'll leave a voicemail.
But I feel like I have to answer when my son is at school/camp.
grg0
The scams do leave voicemails now, and they use voice genAI per the parent comment.
If someone really wants to get a hold of you, they can knock on your door.
Jach
Like I ever answer my door lol. But they can leave something in the mailbox, and I'll at least see the envelope in 1-30 days.
Last week I finally had an onslaught of spam voicemails, several in an hour, that caused me to disable voicemail notifications altogether. I'll just check them when I'm expecting something now, similar to mail. My phone app was successfully filtering the calls so I wouldn't see them, but it still got routed to voicemail which then created a notification.
karim79
Disable! Voicemails are nothing. If something is important it's delivered via text/app or email.
Voice stuff is just narcissists trying to get their way.
Razengan
Why not use AI to detect and avoid scams?
As if people weren't scamming before AI, with the billions of dollars seized from the Chinese scam dungeons in Cambodia [0] where they had kidnapped people and tied them to computers (including a few deaths, and another wave of arrests just recently)
Scammers gonna scam. At least if they can use AI for it then maybe they'll kidnap fewer people
alightsoul
This can backfire and they would go back to kidnapping people. Or they will humanize their ai.
spiresofagartha
That goes beside the point. Scammers probably boosted more their scams with AI than developers boosted their deliveries.
Razengan
Again, AI can also be the solution. Just like the guns vs guns argument yeah?
Chinese models are going to keep getting stronger. Maybe the Free World™ should increase their people's access to and education about AI too.
Terr_
I'm not sure that's a very comforting comparison: It's not clear that guns have that level of deterrent effect, and a world where everyone is shooting ar everyone else with guns is supremely wasteful.
Better to strike at the root of the LLM-scam business model wherever we can.
j16sdiz
> Why not use AI to detect and avoid scams?
Why would the scammer go thru your detector?
Razengan
How would the scammer communicate with you?
Phone? The network could spot sources exhibiting robocall patterns. AI could analyze live conversations and warn the recipient on certain patterns.
Instant messaging? There's spam and abuse screening built into most IMs already. AI could [locally/privately] analyze conversations.
Email? Ditto; analyze conversations, a bit deeper than basic junk mail filters already do.
j16sdiz
I got lots of iMessage spam try to get me to contact them via WhatsApp, signal or their own website.
Unless you ban mentioning other IM platform or communication channel, they will always try to get you on something less monitored
IncreasePosts
It's great to know that AI can be used for scams. Meanwhile, here I am paying for AI, and it accusing me of being either a pedophile or child abuser by asking it to change an image of my six-year-old into a "spy kid" like he requested.
simonw
Here's the report this story is about: https://www.interpol.int/Media/Documents/Publications/Cyberc... (PDF)
Page 24 is where the AI stuff starts being described in detail.
j-conn
So deepfakes and “AI was also used to generate synthetic identities that bypassed KYC checks, craft hyper-personalized phishing lures tailored to individual victims, and produce AI-driven malware capable of evading signature-based detection.”
Our most vulnerable must be getting absolutely hammered by scams. Is anyone working on protecting e.g. elderly people from social engineering? I feel like banks should be proactively suggesting people have a second family member or fiduciary sign off on risky transactions like wiring money to new accounts or pulling out a ton of cash.
I was recently on the phone with a very articulate member of my banks fraud department, or at least I believed they were up until they asked for my two factor code to reset my account. They had visibility into some past legitimate wire transfers which they asked me about along with a fictitious fraudulent one that they “blocked“, and when I pushed back against giving them my two factor code, they had a whole script prepared about needing to freeze my account until I went to a branch with four forms of identification (or just give us the two factor code and avoid the hassle). An acquaintance wired their down payment to a scammer after the real estate firms email system was compromised and scammer inserted their own wire instructions.
Not to mention reports of mythos directly hacking into banking systems. Scary times.
bobajeff
>Access to this site was denied for security reasons. Please contact your network or system administrator
Is what I see. Which makes sense I guess. Maybe just tell me how you got to the page?
gruez
Works for me with VPN enabled. Might just be your IP is blocked.
giancarlostoro
Dunno first time I have ever been on that domain, I think the direct link to the PDF gets you blacklisted, I can navigate the rest of the site just fine.
The PDF is linked here, which you can get to this article from the front page:
https://www.interpol.int/News-and-Events/News/2026/INTERPOL-...
bobajeff
Thanks, That worked.
giancarlostoro
The irony is it doesn't work for me no matter what I do now.
cineticdaffodil
[flagged]
tomhow
We've banned this account. This is not what HN is for and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
tomxor
> You know about the values of a culture, if they call your old parents to rip them off.
Large groups of people in a poor country steal from rich countries, and your explanation is a morally corrupt culture? not the obviously extremely poor prospects of it's citizens?
> They have none, or worse they can talk themselves into this "Robin Hood" psychosis, where stealing the pension from the elderly is just fine, because they are part of the upper crust of the world.
You're describing a cartoon character. Most of these people are trying to survive, not make some kind of twisted moral stand. Please try to recognise the privilege your place of birth affords you and how much of a global minority you are in. Incentives are everything here.
nkrisc
Whatever country you live in, I guarantee you have homegrown criminals from your culture too.
bad_haircut72
Crypto and now AI, every new tech we make these days it seems the main utility is just to enable criminals
ryoshu
In the old days porn peddlers were the pioneers of digital.
55555
Sure but porn is a separate category. It's not really a scam.
TacticalCoder
> Crypto and now AI, every new tech we make these days it seems the main utility is just to enable criminals ...
It's nearly as if there was a lesson here about some individuals in the human race?
What was that yet about psychos? That 1% of all humans, no matter the socio-economic class, no matter the parents, are just full-on psychopaths.
The question is: what do we do, as a society, about those who only want to harm others?
knicholes
Sounds simple to me. Remove them from society.
alightsoul
So kill psychopaths? Or let them kill each other in their own remote island where they are banned or killed on arrival if they go to any other place?
infamouscow
Prison is clearly not a deterrent to violent criminals. Let the psychopaths do whatever to them. 100% sure the rate of violent crime drops precipitously when medieval punishment is likely.
rvz
So not only AI is consuming more energy than than the entire bitcoin network is [0], it is also accounts for more than half of cybercrimes and digital scams in Africa.
I don't think you can even dispute this. AI will be the one to cause the next financial crisis.
[0] https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(25)00142-4
gruez
>AI will be the one to cause the next financial crisis.
So what's the implication here? It sounds like you want AI canceled or curtailed, and if you apply the same logic to the internet in the mid 90s, you would have correctly called out the dotcom bubble. Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?
jackvalentine
I don't think it's necessary to have wants or plans in place when you point out this kind of thing.
You should also be careful about taking imagined positions to the extreme ..."Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?"
gruez
>I don't think it's necessary to have wants or plans in place when you point out this kind of thing.
It does, otherwise what are you arguing for, that financial crises are bad?
>You should also be careful about taking imagined positions to the extreme ..."Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?"
Right, which is why I posed it as a question.
miyoji
> Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?
In retrospect, I think the world would be a much better place if we'd just turned it off in 1998.
boelboel
Late 90s/early 00s internet would've probably been the sweet spot for utility while causing little harm. Sadly we can't just freeze the internet in time.
mrxtravgnt1
Maybe the machines in the Matrix had it right when they said the "height of human civilization"
baby
SWIM got scammed on poshmark a few days ago, as they were selling something they received an email from ethiopia and didn’t pay too much attention and lost $3k
African scammers used to be small scale or lone wolf type of operations. You had scammers like Hushpuppi etc who become celebrities John Gotti style. Now the Chinese have taken over , they are moving from places like Malaysia and setting up these huge scam compounds , they combine the legitimate businesses (construction, import/export) with gambling and these crypto, mobile money and pig butchering scams. This is only going to grow , no one is forced into these things, the youth willing seek work at these places, they are recruited, trained and given the tools they would never afford on their own. You have Chinese labs setup with Servers, high speed internet, USSD capture machines. Our governments won’t and do not want to do crap, the officials get the bribes , the youth get work and everyone is looking the other way. So yeah , this is only going to get worse.