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.
Chinese criminal syndicates have even begun to conduct lure and abduct Indians into scamming centres. They do this by posting fraudulent online job ads leading Indians to clandestine compounds in the golden triangle nations. And then confiscate passports after they arrive, restrain them and then enslave them using threats of physical torture, electric shocks, and isolation cells.
Why do they even bother with India ? Easy manpower and one of the world's largest English speaking nations.
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?
What I meant is in a lot of these compounds in Africa the “workers” are doing this willingly, it is a Job like a 9-5, these are locals who go there to get trained to do this. In other places like Malaysia, Cambodia most of these people ( usually foreigners) are enticed into these Jobs , they get to these countries with the promise of normal employment and find themselves forced into this.
In many of the African countries these are now locals working in Chinese companies, trained by Chinese and protected by corrupt government officials.
My understanding is that while the stories of foreigners being kidnapped to work in a pig butchering compound are much more likely to make international news, the reality on the ground is that the vast majority of people working these scams are not slaves. They are employees in a criminal syndicate.
I'd assume because pigs have to be fattened before slaughter. At the small scale by literally throwing them scraps (pigs eat nearly anything edible).
Meanwhile in a pig butchering scam you have emotionally desperate people (who often would go for figurative scraps) being fed fake romance before being slaughtered (having a lot of money extracted from them, which usually ends in the end of the fake relationship as results don't materialize for the victim, e.g. the lover not showing up)
Because when you buy a live pig, you don't just slaughter and eat it right away, you have to fatten it up over a period of time and then you slaughter it and have a feast. A typical scam is more like fishing, where you catch a fish and then eat it right away. Pig butchering requires a prolonged relationship with the victim to get a higher payout for more work.
It’s an English translation of a Chinese phrase. The method began in China before it came to the west.
“shā zhū pán (杀猪盘) translates literally to "killing pig plate" or "pig slaughter table”.
I read it as asserting that unlike in Asia, people do this work willingly. Which I don't actually believe: if you couldn't find qualified people for this work in Cambodia, how are you going to find them in Africa?
"""
The global spread of the syndicates’ operations has been driven in part by pressure from authorities in Southeast Asia.
A major crackdown on scam centres in Myanmar this year, pushed by Beijing, led to around 7,000 workers from at least two dozen countries being freed.
But the UN report warns that while such efforts disrupt the scam gangs’ immediate activities, they have shown themselves able to adapt and relocate swiftly.
‘It spreads like a cancer,’ UNODC’s Hoffman said.
‘Authorities treat it in one area, but the roots never disappear, they simply migrate.’
"""
These criminals may even belong to the same groups that were targeted by law enforcement in Southeast Asia. they do not actually need to recruit local people. They only need to use advertisements for high-paying “overseas jobs” to attract people with the necessary technical skills and capabilities.
I won't discount the possibility of someone getting into this of their own free will out of hand. But I seriously doubt that it's going to remain this way long term. We have recent examples from Cambodia and Myanmar after all.
A "lab" is a place to experiment and grow. That the subject to experiment and grow with would be "crime" is a reasonable extension of the word, I suppose...
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?
"Is there any way to help the elderly navigate this shift?"
As it stands right now, no. Luckily, at least for now, I'm tech savvy enough to navigate it. But the 100, mostly immigrant, elderly residents of my building will not be so lucky.
Two months ago I learned, during a water outage on a Saturday morning, that my building's new assistant manager was an AI bot from EliseAI. What was an actual emergency, it thought, was something that could be dealt with the following week. It told me that management would respond on Monday, which is completely unacceptable during an emergency water outage. I had no water for 3 days & on Monday the actual human manager waffled on why it wasn't immediately fixed & thought it was cute (he giggled & got excited) that I discovered that the assistant manager was now an AI bot.
And just yesterday, I got an unsolicited text from an unknown number that looks exactly like a phishing scam attempt, except that it was sent by the assistant manager AI bot. The text said that I had $130 in unpaid rent & had links to remedy it. WHAT?!! First, it's illegal in CA to give a tenant notice that way. Second, it looked exactly like a phishing scam attempt. I obviously didn't click the links, but I did parse them & found that they belonged to EliseAI. This also happened a month after the human manager gave out a notice about back rent that I had already asked about. He told me I had $0.00 debt on the books. So why the AI bot phishing attempt?
I perused EliseAI's privacy policy and there is no way that I will be knowingly feeding any PII into it.
I haven't tracked down the manager yet to give him a piece of my mind. But in what world is this kind of activity OK? How are non-tech savvy folks going to survive these things? Especially the large non-English speaking elderly population in my building. As far as I can see (I live in SF & am surrounded by it), we're doomed.
Encourage them to move their money to where it's at least more difficult to access.
Recently I discovered that my mam – a middle-class ex-civil-servant, not rich, but not poor – had £++ sitting in the account that was linked to the Visa card she carries around all day. Why? Just because she hadn't moved it elsewhere. Terrifying, obviously.
All she needed was my encouragement. I think it's in Premium Bonds now: not scam-proof, but at least not trivially scammable.
My elderly father uses a financial planner/wealth management firm.
Their returns are not spectacular and they charge fees but overall they are net positive on returns.
My sister and I were discussing if this was a great idea for him and she pointed out:
"Really, he needs someone he can call to send a check somewhere or send a digital payment and he just calls them and they make it happen."
Ideally, there would be a more generic service that would do this for the elderly. It would be the financial version of those "senior phones" that have big buttons and a "help" button that connects you to a person.
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.
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.
It gets a bit more complicated than that. I don't even regularly need things from my doctor, but I have a referral to a specialist right now, and the waiting time is around 16 months to be contacted by them. At that time they will randomly call me from a restricted number. So I must have all call screening and blocking off for probably 2 years in order to accommodate this. And I can't time it because in the past I was referred to a different one and they contacted me in only 4 months when they said 12+.
Had similar situation here in the US -- though with a more tolerable delay -- with a private health care provider.
The fix of course is an enforced requirement from higher authority that health care providers communicate only by means that prove identity of the source -- never calling from an unverifiable number.
This doesn’t work for older folks. They have medical providers constantly randomly reaching out. Typically medication changes or reminding them it’s time to come do labs or whatever.
That and trying to walk my parents through turning this sort of thing on already was a 3 hour long process. That they will in no way remember even with a checklist.
There is unlikely going to be a technical way to solve this social problem, as is usually the case.
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
In places where we have that the scam is just money for transport, utilities, or whatever. Something has happened which means they cannot access their money and make the usual payment.
We actually had an experience with a bank fraud team recently and they relentlessly ask over and over "is the recipient in financial difficulty?". They're not passing judgement on them but trying to work out if you've been convinced that they are and you need to send them money [urgently] to help.
My aunt was recently hit by this scam, they used a deep fake of a teenager and she really believed it was my cousin. The lie was that he was stuck in Montreal and needed money for the next flight home.
This happened in Canada. I don’t think having socialized healthcare makes as much of a difference as one would hope.
The problem is that many scammers now groom your brain into trusting them before they even mention money. This is a psychological thing where you can’t necessarily just tell yourself “I’m not going to fall for that.” There are reports from professional scambaiters who, after engaging with a phone scammer for a while, found themselves inexplicably clinging to the belief the scheme was real.
This is possibly due to how our brains are wired to trust an already-established narrative and due to the effect that repeated interactions have on trust. When the scammer eventually steers the topic towards money, phenomena such as the Semmelweis reflex [0] may have already kicked in, which can make it super difficult to re-frame the person as a scammer.
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.
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.
For voice scams this is critical. I set up duress codes with all of my non technical and elderly family and close friends last year.
It should be a simple, pink-elephant-type nonsense question and answer that you rehearse a few times in person and make sure they never share with others. “Q: What’s your favorite leprechaun? A: Rutabaga” or something. Even cognitively impaired folks can, with a few rehearsals over a day or so, retain that easily, I’ve found.
Reminding them to practice it when people reach out pretending to be me takes a bit more rehearsal, but I’ve found that it sticks reliably even then.
The scams have to be culturally relevant to be effective, which is why they set out wide bets looking to see what sticks with a fairly small target audience.
An addendum is don't give money when you're called by a "legitimate contact", call them back first. The scammer is remote so they can pretend to be the "legitimate contact" but not so easy to block the real legitimate contact from being contacted for validation.
I had a similar problem with phone scams for my elder parents. Installed Asterisk with a Raspberry on their land line to allow only whitelisted numbers and the problem was solved. I guess someone has to step in at some point. Problem is not every parent has a tech literate child and the industry doesn’t seem to bother to offer decent solutions. All call blocker hardware that I found didn’t allow whitelist functionality. I guess there’s a business opportunity here easily, build hardware/software solutions to protect the elderly.
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.
As an alternative to actually talking for them and being near them, maaaaaybe. Though, at that point you're introducing trust to something that attackers might learn to emulate enough to make it part of the scam one day.
The solution is that in the West, many Boomers are isolated from their families because many of us move for work or college. Get them some friends, a community, a local shuffleboard group or something so they're not so desperate for any connection that they answer every phone call and email with desperation.
No, there is no way to help them. But the coming generations of elderly will be more resistant, as they've grown up in an all-scam society.
You could stand in real life in front of your parents or grandparents while they're talking on the phone to a scammer pretending to be you, and they would rather believe the scammer than believe you.
The current generation of elderly have great disdain and distrust for their children and grandchildren, and the highest respect and deference towards any perceived authority, and especially if they are contacting them through mail or phone. It's just the hyena mindset: Kiss ass of those you perceive to be higher in rank than you, kick down on those you perceive to be lower in rank than you.
You could be the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and your elderly relatives would rather believe a scammer calling and pretending to be their banker than believe you.
I hope you’re right. Anecdotally based on the significant number of young, digital native people I know who are getting successfully scammed, I’m not sure.
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.
neutralize largest threat surface, work your way down.
First is email. Have their login. Then can-spam everything from nigerian princes. Usually if they have been pig butchered in some way before, they are "hot targets". SO they will continue to receive emails until the algo has been retrained to reject the massive amount of junk they likely get. Set up tons of filters as well.
The 2nd threat surface are landlines, since they usually have been around for a while and the number has been passed around. Force VM-only for unknown callers. Then have VM transcribed and sent over to you. Scammers will not usually leave VM so its an autofilter. Anything important, you can relay. With LLMs this becomes considerably easier.
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
> 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).
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]
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Active investing was the source of the problem here. Retail investors were buying leveraged bets on Samsung and SK Hynix which has wiped out their investment now it's crashed.
Had they passively invested in indexes over a long time they would be up still.
Consider everything it takes in organization to be able to send rockets to space and bring them back. That kind of organization would be able to do anything. There is where the value is. The world is not static and people are not static.
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
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).
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.
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.
Your instinct is correct. Options markets are wide following an IPO (ie there is a significant difference between the price at which a dealer will sell a specific option at a specific strike for a specific time).
That tends to settle down ~60 days after trading, with seasonsed order flow, a realized volatility pattern, Observed volumes, open interest, liquidity in the stock (eg hedging becomes cheaper) and naturally - competition between market makers.
Wide spreads are profitable for options dealers (and you need that profit to absorb losses where risk is misjudged or the stock is unpredictable) - but if two dealers are making excess profits offering wide markets in an option, a 3rd will join and undercut them.
Source - I was a quant at a large investment bank, with ~5 years facing the Equity markets / 13 years across many desks and teams.
For good or bad, no one else is doing what they're doing. That capability (and lack of safety concern) is just not present on any other car you can buy today, and certainly not back in 2015. I do wonder how they've gotten away with it through such a wide variety of governments and regulatory environments.
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.
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
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.
So mark it as very suspicious and be done. All the detection in the world won't help if the user refuses to listen. But they can refuse or go in wary, and potentially ask for advice later.
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.
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
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.
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.
You did say that. And then despite that you reached a conclusion that I don't see as compatible.
There is a massive qualitative and quantitative gap between the two. Even if you had a real token predictor for the word spam, you would need a thousand of these to touch LLM capability. But it's not a real predictor. It's not locational. It's something vastly weaker.
> It's all the same sort of thing though: some functions trained to predict a value associated with an input.
Now you made it even worse. If not for the word 'trained' this would be every program. If two programs fall under the umbrella of machine learning in any way, that kind of logic treats them the same. What would you consider a "different kind of AI"? Your definition there fits basically the entire field.
It's true however I do feel that when talking about scams AI can be used offensively way easier. Using it for things like the prevention of phone scams seems quite a bit more difficult to me to get accurate.
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.
"proper scam"; if you get too many hooks, you're not going to be able to reel them in. I'm not defining a scam; if you create a really convincing scam, your problem becomes both having too many people and drawing to much attention.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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?
> It does, otherwise what are you arguing for, that financial crises are bad?
To create a false dichotomy like this tells exactly why we have this problem.
I am arguing against the unnecessary over-spending on data centers that has gone into AI, in favor of making efficient models that take less energy, such that less data centers are needed.
The blockchains in many cryptocurrencies have found a way to scale and take significantly far less energy, thanks to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus over Proof-of-Work (PoW).
We have seen little to almost none of this with the current frontier AI models which is why they currently need orders of magnitude of energy to operate at scale, which is why the over-spending and debt accumulation on data centers exists.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
By endemic I mean to its core, it’s the difference of having everyone being corrupt versus just the elites / political class being corrupt. If anyone thinks that the problem of corrupt elites could be improved by extending that corruption to everyone then I’m not sure what would convince them otherwise.
I am suggesting that it's more than the elites, then you'd have to take into account the people who would act in a corrupt way if presented with the opportunity. As someone who has tried and failed to sell software into Cambodia I know from experience that the corruption there is very thorough and continues well on down to the lower strata of society.
Have you ever even been to Cambodia? I spent half a year LIVING there.
Trying to sell software into Cambodia puts you squarely in a procurement situation where you're going to encounter the patronage networks that are responsible for the corruption.
So since you seem to be suggesting the Cambodians have a disposition towards "act[ing] in a corrupt way if presented with the opportunity" (versus, say, Americans who you seem to think just elect corrupt politicians but have no disposition towards corruption themselves), why don't you share your experiences with the "lower strata" of Cambodian society as a software salesman?
In case anyone else is still reading this, there's an important context here: the US dropped 2.7 million tons of explosives on Cambodia during the Vietnam War. This is more than the Allies dropped in all of WW2.
The bombing was a direct cause in the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and an estimated 20-25% of the country's population (1.5-3 million people) died under the Khmer Rouge. People in rural areas still die every year in Cambodia due to unexploded ordnance.
American action against Cambodia was part of the First Indochina War, in which France was fighting to maintain a hold on its French Indochina colonial empire. In principle, the US got involved to stop the spread of communism but in reality, it was also doing France's bidding.
The result: millions of innocent people were killed by US military action. Cambodia and Vietnam were left destitute after the war, and the US, having lost, engaged in an economic war against Cambodia and Vietnam through the 1980s. In 1990, the nominal GDP per capita in Cambodia and Vietnam was under $200. People literally had nothing. Hunger and threat of famine was widespread.
So anytime you see a Westerner hinting that people in countries like Cambodia and Vietnam are more likely to "act in a corrupt way if presented with the opportunity", as if they are a less moral form of human being, you can read it for what it is: just a continuation of the racial, cultural and economic superiority complex of the West that has caused mass destruction all over the world and still somehow finds a way to blame its own victims for their misfortune.
No. A country is not a homogenous mass, and people hated Vietnam, and that was decades ago. Someone in the US mentioning Cambodia's abysmal position on the corruption perception index should understand the fucked up role their country had in that but that doesn't mean they're having a "superiority complex" or "blaming" the wrong people.
> ...the corruption there is very thorough and continues well on down to the lower strata of society.
This coming from a person who apparently never lived in Cambodia and might never have even visited, but who tried and failed to sell software to Cambodians.
This is a perfect example of the Western superiority complex. The average person in Cambodia is 27 years old. Well over half the population lives in rural areas, where median salaries are under $300/month and higher education enrollment is not even 25%.
The implied suggestion that Cambodians are a more corruptible form of human is as sad as it is ridiculous.
I was unsuccessful because I wouldn’t pay the bribes, I had a number of independent local advisors give pretty consistent accounts to how things work there.
I wouldn’t be so worried about the corruption of my society if I thought there was something implicit that meant we wouldn’t be corrupted in the same way that others are.
Nor do I blame the Cambodians for their predicament. You’re tilting at windmills.
> I was unsuccessful because I wouldn’t pay the bribes, I had a number of independent local advisors give pretty consistent accounts to how things work there.
You didn't need to pay any advisors. It's very well-known that selling into Cambodian companies, all of the successful of which are owned by people who are part of the patronage networks, is typically pay to play.
But I still fail to see how this gives you any insight into the lower stratas of Cambodian society. The people who are living and working in Phnom Penh making procurement/purchasing decisions are not even "average" Cambodians. They're among the more fortunate.
The average Cambodian is a "poor" person trying to get through the day with limited awareness of the power structures in Phnom Penh. Even the ones who have some awareness of the system they live in know they're powerless to change it.
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.)
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.
> ...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?
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.
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.
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."
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
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..
I didn't say kill. Not sure if I believe we should go all Hunger Games on them. Prison works just fine for me when they commit crimes sufficiently egregious.
So you are born, and then immediately go to prison? Wouldn't it be more humane to euthanize them at birth? Isn't this a way to achieve the goal of eugenics?
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.
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.
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:
> 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.
Aside from the fact that this would be a despicable crime, how would you even go about identifying where a given scammer operation has its office buildings?
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
I feel any criminal is a big beneficiary of AI. Its something that's not being talked enough by the big AI players who are just chasing profit by burning books, consuming water, promising people getting thrown out of jobs and of course productivity. Now that the cat's out of the bag I don't event see a way to limit all the negative net effects that will ripple through society.
> "Prediction: in 1-2 years, almost everyone will agree that open sourcing the best AIs is totally crazy as the AIs become capable of autonomous hacking of most humans and institutions, serious terrorism and creation of biological weapons, etc."
There’s little to no reason why someone from Africa should be able to make a call to the first world. It should be either extremely expensive or simply impossible.
Can you elaborate? In the spirit of the rules of HN I'm trying to assume good faith and trying to conjure the strongest plausible interpretation of what you wrote, but I'm drawing a blank.
You can’t make it expensive enough to stop scammers, while not too expensive to impede legitimate calls like businesses, family overseas, or tourists calling home.
There is a very high volume of legitimate calls from Africa, and scammers actually have tons of capital to work with.
And this does not even get into the technical difficulty of defining and detecting a “call” “from” Africa. Voice can be tunneled to U.S. infrastructure and then passed to telephony carriers as a “domestic call.”
If it’s a legitimate commercial relation (like a mining operation) they won’t have any issues paying the price or setting up alternate communication channels.
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.
Chinese criminal syndicates have even begun to conduct lure and abduct Indians into scamming centres. They do this by posting fraudulent online job ads leading Indians to clandestine compounds in the golden triangle nations. And then confiscate passports after they arrive, restrain them and then enslave them using threats of physical torture, electric shocks, and isolation cells.
Why do they even bother with India ? Easy manpower and one of the world's largest English speaking nations.
>>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?
What I meant is in a lot of these compounds in Africa the “workers” are doing this willingly, it is a Job like a 9-5, these are locals who go there to get trained to do this. In other places like Malaysia, Cambodia most of these people ( usually foreigners) are enticed into these Jobs , they get to these countries with the promise of normal employment and find themselves forced into this. In many of the African countries these are now locals working in Chinese companies, trained by Chinese and protected by corrupt government officials.
My understanding is that while the stories of foreigners being kidnapped to work in a pig butchering compound are much more likely to make international news, the reality on the ground is that the vast majority of people working these scams are not slaves. They are employees in a criminal syndicate.
Yup, this is usually the case in pig butchering operations iirc.
What, if I assume we're employing nicknames here, is a pig butchering operation?
Any scam where the scammer maintains a long-term relationship with the victim - fattening them up - before suddenly taking all their money.
For example a romance scam where the scammer pretends to be your girlfriend who loves you for 6 months and then asks for money to cover an emergency.
Or a stock market scam that might even pay out small profits before convincing you to go all in.
Some kind of romance scam. Look it up.
But what do pigs have to do with any of that?
I'd assume because pigs have to be fattened before slaughter. At the small scale by literally throwing them scraps (pigs eat nearly anything edible).
Meanwhile in a pig butchering scam you have emotionally desperate people (who often would go for figurative scraps) being fed fake romance before being slaughtered (having a lot of money extracted from them, which usually ends in the end of the fake relationship as results don't materialize for the victim, e.g. the lover not showing up)
Because when you buy a live pig, you don't just slaughter and eat it right away, you have to fatten it up over a period of time and then you slaughter it and have a feast. A typical scam is more like fishing, where you catch a fish and then eat it right away. Pig butchering requires a prolonged relationship with the victim to get a higher payout for more work.
It’s an English translation of a Chinese phrase. The method began in China before it came to the west. “shā zhū pán (杀猪盘) translates literally to "killing pig plate" or "pig slaughter table”.
It's just analogy which is useful to depict process well: pig needs to be fed and taken care of for some time before it's butchered
I read it as asserting that unlike in Asia, people do this work willingly. Which I don't actually believe: if you couldn't find qualified people for this work in Cambodia, how are you going to find them in Africa?
According to some news report
""" The global spread of the syndicates’ operations has been driven in part by pressure from authorities in Southeast Asia.
A major crackdown on scam centres in Myanmar this year, pushed by Beijing, led to around 7,000 workers from at least two dozen countries being freed.
But the UN report warns that while such efforts disrupt the scam gangs’ immediate activities, they have shown themselves able to adapt and relocate swiftly.
‘It spreads like a cancer,’ UNODC’s Hoffman said.
‘Authorities treat it in one area, but the roots never disappear, they simply migrate.’ """
These criminals may even belong to the same groups that were targeted by law enforcement in Southeast Asia. they do not actually need to recruit local people. They only need to use advertisements for high-paying “overseas jobs” to attract people with the necessary technical skills and capabilities.
I won't discount the possibility of someone getting into this of their own free will out of hand. But I seriously doubt that it's going to remain this way long term. We have recent examples from Cambodia and Myanmar after all.
Why do you call them “labs”?
A "lab" is a place to experiment and grow. That the subject to experiment and grow with would be "crime" is a reasonable extension of the word, I suppose...
Malaysia prison. Man I would weigh things out.
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?
"Is there any way to help the elderly navigate this shift?"
As it stands right now, no. Luckily, at least for now, I'm tech savvy enough to navigate it. But the 100, mostly immigrant, elderly residents of my building will not be so lucky.
Two months ago I learned, during a water outage on a Saturday morning, that my building's new assistant manager was an AI bot from EliseAI. What was an actual emergency, it thought, was something that could be dealt with the following week. It told me that management would respond on Monday, which is completely unacceptable during an emergency water outage. I had no water for 3 days & on Monday the actual human manager waffled on why it wasn't immediately fixed & thought it was cute (he giggled & got excited) that I discovered that the assistant manager was now an AI bot.
And just yesterday, I got an unsolicited text from an unknown number that looks exactly like a phishing scam attempt, except that it was sent by the assistant manager AI bot. The text said that I had $130 in unpaid rent & had links to remedy it. WHAT?!! First, it's illegal in CA to give a tenant notice that way. Second, it looked exactly like a phishing scam attempt. I obviously didn't click the links, but I did parse them & found that they belonged to EliseAI. This also happened a month after the human manager gave out a notice about back rent that I had already asked about. He told me I had $0.00 debt on the books. So why the AI bot phishing attempt?
I perused EliseAI's privacy policy and there is no way that I will be knowingly feeding any PII into it.
I haven't tracked down the manager yet to give him a piece of my mind. But in what world is this kind of activity OK? How are non-tech savvy folks going to survive these things? Especially the large non-English speaking elderly population in my building. As far as I can see (I live in SF & am surrounded by it), we're doomed.
Encourage them to move their money to where it's at least more difficult to access.
Recently I discovered that my mam – a middle-class ex-civil-servant, not rich, but not poor – had £++ sitting in the account that was linked to the Visa card she carries around all day. Why? Just because she hadn't moved it elsewhere. Terrifying, obviously.
All she needed was my encouragement. I think it's in Premium Bonds now: not scam-proof, but at least not trivially scammable.
My elderly father uses a financial planner/wealth management firm.
Their returns are not spectacular and they charge fees but overall they are net positive on returns.
My sister and I were discussing if this was a great idea for him and she pointed out:
"Really, he needs someone he can call to send a check somewhere or send a digital payment and he just calls them and they make it happen."
Ideally, there would be a more generic service that would do this for the elderly. It would be the financial version of those "senior phones" that have big buttons and a "help" button that connects you to a person.
Even simpler: I wish banks would allow you to set up a requirement of MFA for transactions over a certain amount (with everyone's consent of course).
My parents are not yet a concern for this stuff, but I imagine eventually they might be.
So I would get a notification on my phone to approve the transaction/withdrawal.
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.
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.
Legitimate actors perusing poor security policies is actually the biggest threat vector.
Yeah, I think thats a valid edge case - and a manageable one. If you are expecting a call from a doctor, lift the firewall for a while.
It gets a bit more complicated than that. I don't even regularly need things from my doctor, but I have a referral to a specialist right now, and the waiting time is around 16 months to be contacted by them. At that time they will randomly call me from a restricted number. So I must have all call screening and blocking off for probably 2 years in order to accommodate this. And I can't time it because in the past I was referred to a different one and they contacted me in only 4 months when they said 12+.
Had similar situation here in the US -- though with a more tolerable delay -- with a private health care provider.
The fix of course is an enforced requirement from higher authority that health care providers communicate only by means that prove identity of the source -- never calling from an unverifiable number.
How to make that happen, though ... ?
This doesn’t work for older folks. They have medical providers constantly randomly reaching out. Typically medication changes or reminding them it’s time to come do labs or whatever.
That and trying to walk my parents through turning this sort of thing on already was a 3 hour long process. That they will in no way remember even with a checklist.
There is unlikely going to be a technical way to solve this social problem, as is usually the case.
Personal assistants in the Philippines and hope they don’t scam you themselves
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."
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
You just gave me an idea... Let's all pitch in and spread the cost of health care around. Average it out so no one gets left behind.
In places where we have that the scam is just money for transport, utilities, or whatever. Something has happened which means they cannot access their money and make the usual payment.
We actually had an experience with a bank fraud team recently and they relentlessly ask over and over "is the recipient in financial difficulty?". They're not passing judgement on them but trying to work out if you've been convinced that they are and you need to send them money [urgently] to help.
My aunt was recently hit by this scam, they used a deep fake of a teenager and she really believed it was my cousin. The lie was that he was stuck in Montreal and needed money for the next flight home.
This happened in Canada. I don’t think having socialized healthcare makes as much of a difference as one would hope.
The problem is that many scammers now groom your brain into trusting them before they even mention money. This is a psychological thing where you can’t necessarily just tell yourself “I’m not going to fall for that.” There are reports from professional scambaiters who, after engaging with a phone scammer for a while, found themselves inexplicably clinging to the belief the scheme was real.
This is possibly due to how our brains are wired to trust an already-established narrative and due to the effect that repeated interactions have on trust. When the scammer eventually steers the topic towards money, phenomena such as the Semmelweis reflex [0] may have already kicked in, which can make it super difficult to re-frame the person as a scammer.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis_reflex
That is completely impractical for most people.
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.
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.
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."
For voice scams this is critical. I set up duress codes with all of my non technical and elderly family and close friends last year.
It should be a simple, pink-elephant-type nonsense question and answer that you rehearse a few times in person and make sure they never share with others. “Q: What’s your favorite leprechaun? A: Rutabaga” or something. Even cognitively impaired folks can, with a few rehearsals over a day or so, retain that easily, I’ve found.
Reminding them to practice it when people reach out pretending to be me takes a bit more rehearsal, but I’ve found that it sticks reliably even then.
I use "Queen to queen's level 3" and then wait for the appropriate response.
The answer is easily found by Google, and any AI could give the correct answer instantly.
And that's why you teach your elders the wrong answer for a right question! :D
That's not "usually" the scam. It's a scam, but it's not the most common.
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.
Yeah, fair point, it's pretty well outside normal for me (there's a world outside of my lived experience? Nah!)
The scams have to be culturally relevant to be effective, which is why they set out wide bets looking to see what sticks with a fairly small target audience.
An addendum is don't give money when you're called by a "legitimate contact", call them back first. The scammer is remote so they can pretend to be the "legitimate contact" but not so easy to block the real legitimate contact from being contacted for validation.
Wow. Well those people are going to be scammed. A LOT
Yeah they do. Now add mobile money to the equation.
Why?
I had a similar problem with phone scams for my elder parents. Installed Asterisk with a Raspberry on their land line to allow only whitelisted numbers and the problem was solved. I guess someone has to step in at some point. Problem is not every parent has a tech literate child and the industry doesn’t seem to bother to offer decent solutions. All call blocker hardware that I found didn’t allow whitelist functionality. I guess there’s a business opportunity here easily, build hardware/software solutions to protect the elderly.
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.
so the solution in this brave new world is to preemptively fill the gap with benevolent chatbot penpals?
As an alternative to actually talking for them and being near them, maaaaaybe. Though, at that point you're introducing trust to something that attackers might learn to emulate enough to make it part of the scam one day.
The solution is that in the West, many Boomers are isolated from their families because many of us move for work or college. Get them some friends, a community, a local shuffleboard group or something so they're not so desperate for any connection that they answer every phone call and email with desperation.
No, there is no way to help them. But the coming generations of elderly will be more resistant, as they've grown up in an all-scam society.
You could stand in real life in front of your parents or grandparents while they're talking on the phone to a scammer pretending to be you, and they would rather believe the scammer than believe you.
The current generation of elderly have great disdain and distrust for their children and grandchildren, and the highest respect and deference towards any perceived authority, and especially if they are contacting them through mail or phone. It's just the hyena mindset: Kiss ass of those you perceive to be higher in rank than you, kick down on those you perceive to be lower in rank than you.
You could be the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and your elderly relatives would rather believe a scammer calling and pretending to be their banker than believe you.
I hope you’re right. Anecdotally based on the significant number of young, digital native people I know who are getting successfully scammed, I’m not sure.
I assume AI assistants would be able to prevent a lot of this
It's an intriguing idea, but prompt injection and misleading the AI seem like fairly trivial things to do right?
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.
neutralize largest threat surface, work your way down.
First is email. Have their login. Then can-spam everything from nigerian princes. Usually if they have been pig butchered in some way before, they are "hot targets". SO they will continue to receive emails until the algo has been retrained to reject the massive amount of junk they likely get. Set up tons of filters as well.
The 2nd threat surface are landlines, since they usually have been around for a while and the number has been passed around. Force VM-only for unknown callers. Then have VM transcribed and sent over to you. Scammers will not usually leave VM so its an autofilter. Anything important, you can relay. With LLMs this becomes considerably easier.
> Is there any way to help the elderly navigate this shift?
You can become a legal guardian, and/or get access and shared ownership on their bank account and monitor it constantly. But yeah , it's a hassle.
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
> 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).
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
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
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.
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.
I'll take your point and rabbit hole it a bit sir.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
And, it also allows for more advanced, labour intensive, targeted styles of attacks to be leveled at targets much less promising.
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!
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?
Bash = tried Tosh = nonsense Bollocks = also nonsense
Fair enough man. I didn't write the paper no need to hate on me sir.
(Parent’s helpfully defining the Britishisms for HN readers)
As a British person I find this to be very very British.
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.
Don't forget to check out: "bosh", "cosh", "dosh", "gosh", "josh", "mosh", and "nosh" too! ;)
Sorry were they Englishisms or something, almost clarified I didn’t know!
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.
I simply don't answer calls from unknown numbers. I feel like it's my right as a grown-up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Coincidentally it’s also the biggest scam in the west. Wait till the IPO and the inevitable 80% stock drop of OpenAI ….
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.
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.
"cringelord"
I cracked. Had never seen that used before, yet so obvious now in retrospect. Pure poetry.
People buying shares at a given price does not necessarily mean they believe the company is worth that much
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
>Keynesian beauty contest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
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!
+1 for the word Cringelord. I have taken this and shall use it on my journeys.
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.
The SK stock market is still up 55% since the start of this year.
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)
Active investing was the source of the problem here. Retail investors were buying leveraged bets on Samsung and SK Hynix which has wiped out their investment now it's crashed.
Had they passively invested in indexes over a long time they would be up still.
He can keep the scam going for a long time but not forever.
Consider everything it takes in organization to be able to send rockets to space and bring them back. That kind of organization would be able to do anything. There is where the value is. The world is not static and people are not static.
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
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.
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.
Do you plan to bet on this by buying PUTs? Should be easy money, right? /s
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.
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.
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.
Your instinct is correct. Options markets are wide following an IPO (ie there is a significant difference between the price at which a dealer will sell a specific option at a specific strike for a specific time).
That tends to settle down ~60 days after trading, with seasonsed order flow, a realized volatility pattern, Observed volumes, open interest, liquidity in the stock (eg hedging becomes cheaper) and naturally - competition between market makers.
Wide spreads are profitable for options dealers (and you need that profit to absorb losses where risk is misjudged or the stock is unpredictable) - but if two dealers are making excess profits offering wide markets in an option, a 3rd will join and undercut them.
Source - I was a quant at a large investment bank, with ~5 years facing the Equity markets / 13 years across many desks and teams.
Here's a chart of the last 20 IPOs with their Relative Spread (Bid + Offer / Midpoint) on each successive day of trading to show the tightening of spreads over time. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-bLekd5OonnrlEZyjRPNQYZmvnG...
Oh wow, thank you for that chart. That is fantastic. The premium is huge. And for good reasons.
For good or bad, no one else is doing what they're doing. That capability (and lack of safety concern) is just not present on any other car you can buy today, and certainly not back in 2015. I do wonder how they've gotten away with it through such a wide variety of governments and regulatory environments.
Since no one else has said it, "The market can remain irrational longer that you can remain solvent."
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/
OpenAI isn’t public so… /s
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.
You’re on a social media site filled mostly with AI bots right now. Try saying something negative about China in any thread
China is bad and Xi looks like Winnie the Pooh
If you pick Israel instead, it gets flagged much faster.
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
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45580981
That goes beside the point. Scammers probably boosted more their scams with AI than developers boosted their deliveries.
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.
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.
> deterrent
"If you scam us, we'll scam, you back" ?
I too am unconvinced.
This can backfire and they would go back to kidnapping people. Or they will humanize their ai.
> Why not use AI to detect and avoid scams?
Why would the scammer go thru your detector?
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.
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
So mark it as very suspicious and be done. All the detection in the world won't help if the user refuses to listen. But they can refuse or go in wary, and potentially ask for advice later.
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.
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.
It's been used for defense for a long time. AI is why spam filters started actually working in the 2000s.
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
> 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
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
Yet another instance of when something from the field of AI actually works, it stops being called AI.
different kind of AI
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.
The complete inability to use it to generate spam doesn't make it different to you?
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.
You did say that. And then despite that you reached a conclusion that I don't see as compatible.
There is a massive qualitative and quantitative gap between the two. Even if you had a real token predictor for the word spam, you would need a thousand of these to touch LLM capability. But it's not a real predictor. It's not locational. It's something vastly weaker.
> It's all the same sort of thing though: some functions trained to predict a value associated with an input.
Now you made it even worse. If not for the word 'trained' this would be every program. If two programs fall under the umbrella of machine learning in any way, that kind of logic treats them the same. What would you consider a "different kind of AI"? Your definition there fits basically the entire field.
It's true however I do feel that when talking about scams AI can be used offensively way easier. Using it for things like the prevention of phone scams seems quite a bit more difficult to me to get accurate.
With all the Nigerian princes out there, you'd think one of the bastards would have already made an official claim to the throne.
That's like calling stones fuel for violence. It's everyone's choice what they use the internet or stones for.
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.
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.
"proper scam"; if you get too many hooks, you're not going to be able to reel them in. I'm not defining a scam; if you create a really convincing scam, your problem becomes both having too many people and drawing to much attention.
So I stand by my terms.
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)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The first Nigerian Prince scams started over email.
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...
Snail mail scams like that were common for decades prior. My mates dad nearly fell for one once.
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.
Are you saying that the email I got yesterday, was not from the next King of Nigeria asking for a joint business operation in it?
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
Computers consumer more energy than both the bitcoin network and AI. And they are responsible for all the cybercrime everywhere.
>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?
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?"
>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.
> It does, otherwise what are you arguing for, that financial crises are bad?
To create a false dichotomy like this tells exactly why we have this problem.
I am arguing against the unnecessary over-spending on data centers that has gone into AI, in favor of making efficient models that take less energy, such that less data centers are needed.
The blockchains in many cryptocurrencies have found a way to scale and take significantly far less energy, thanks to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus over Proof-of-Work (PoW).
We have seen little to almost none of this with the current frontier AI models which is why they currently need orders of magnitude of energy to operate at scale, which is why the over-spending and debt accumulation on data centers exists.
> 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.
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.
Maybe the machines in the Matrix had it right when they said the "height of human civilization"
Advance-fee scams have been around since the 18th century, internet is not required.
I was thinking about more than just scams when I thought of the comment. But I'm probably looking with rose coloured glasses at the early internet.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
[dead]
> endemically corrupt
Both options are endemically corrupt but removing most kinds of corruption is an improvement.
By endemic I mean to its core, it’s the difference of having everyone being corrupt versus just the elites / political class being corrupt. If anyone thinks that the problem of corrupt elites could be improved by extending that corruption to everyone then I’m not sure what would convince them otherwise.
Sure, I agree with you. I was using the other person's broader description of endemic there.
Are you suggesting that all the people in countries like Cambodia are "corrupt"?
I am suggesting that it's more than the elites, then you'd have to take into account the people who would act in a corrupt way if presented with the opportunity. As someone who has tried and failed to sell software into Cambodia I know from experience that the corruption there is very thorough and continues well on down to the lower strata of society.
Have you ever even been to Cambodia? I spent half a year LIVING there.
Trying to sell software into Cambodia puts you squarely in a procurement situation where you're going to encounter the patronage networks that are responsible for the corruption.
So since you seem to be suggesting the Cambodians have a disposition towards "act[ing] in a corrupt way if presented with the opportunity" (versus, say, Americans who you seem to think just elect corrupt politicians but have no disposition towards corruption themselves), why don't you share your experiences with the "lower strata" of Cambodian society as a software salesman?
No, I don’t think I will
That might be your smartest response here.
In case anyone else is still reading this, there's an important context here: the US dropped 2.7 million tons of explosives on Cambodia during the Vietnam War. This is more than the Allies dropped in all of WW2.
The bombing was a direct cause in the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and an estimated 20-25% of the country's population (1.5-3 million people) died under the Khmer Rouge. People in rural areas still die every year in Cambodia due to unexploded ordnance.
American action against Cambodia was part of the First Indochina War, in which France was fighting to maintain a hold on its French Indochina colonial empire. In principle, the US got involved to stop the spread of communism but in reality, it was also doing France's bidding.
The result: millions of innocent people were killed by US military action. Cambodia and Vietnam were left destitute after the war, and the US, having lost, engaged in an economic war against Cambodia and Vietnam through the 1980s. In 1990, the nominal GDP per capita in Cambodia and Vietnam was under $200. People literally had nothing. Hunger and threat of famine was widespread.
So anytime you see a Westerner hinting that people in countries like Cambodia and Vietnam are more likely to "act in a corrupt way if presented with the opportunity", as if they are a less moral form of human being, you can read it for what it is: just a continuation of the racial, cultural and economic superiority complex of the West that has caused mass destruction all over the world and still somehow finds a way to blame its own victims for their misfortune.
No. A country is not a homogenous mass, and people hated Vietnam, and that was decades ago. Someone in the US mentioning Cambodia's abysmal position on the corruption perception index should understand the fucked up role their country had in that but that doesn't mean they're having a "superiority complex" or "blaming" the wrong people.
The OP stated:
> ...the corruption there is very thorough and continues well on down to the lower strata of society.
This coming from a person who apparently never lived in Cambodia and might never have even visited, but who tried and failed to sell software to Cambodians.
This is a perfect example of the Western superiority complex. The average person in Cambodia is 27 years old. Well over half the population lives in rural areas, where median salaries are under $300/month and higher education enrollment is not even 25%.
The implied suggestion that Cambodians are a more corruptible form of human is as sad as it is ridiculous.
I was unsuccessful because I wouldn’t pay the bribes, I had a number of independent local advisors give pretty consistent accounts to how things work there.
I wouldn’t be so worried about the corruption of my society if I thought there was something implicit that meant we wouldn’t be corrupted in the same way that others are.
Nor do I blame the Cambodians for their predicament. You’re tilting at windmills.
> I was unsuccessful because I wouldn’t pay the bribes, I had a number of independent local advisors give pretty consistent accounts to how things work there.
You didn't need to pay any advisors. It's very well-known that selling into Cambodian companies, all of the successful of which are owned by people who are part of the patronage networks, is typically pay to play.
But I still fail to see how this gives you any insight into the lower stratas of Cambodian society. The people who are living and working in Phnom Penh making procurement/purchasing decisions are not even "average" Cambodians. They're among the more fortunate.
They are more corrupted, not more inherently corruptable.
Culture is real. Different countries have different levels of corruption. The US is currently getting worse on this measure.
Except they aren't.
The average Cambodian is a "poor" person trying to get through the day with limited awareness of the power structures in Phnom Penh. Even the ones who have some awareness of the system they live in know they're powerless to change it.
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.)
The current administration is giving them a run for the money. Might come out ahead in regards regards to corruption too. Number one.
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.
> ...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?
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.
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.
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
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."
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
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..
AI companies should be held liable for this.
Crypto and now AI, every new tech we make these days it seems the main utility is just to enable criminals
In the old days porn peddlers were the pioneers of digital.
Sure but porn is a separate category. It's not really a scam.
> 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?
Sounds simple to me. Remove them from society.
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?
I didn't say kill. Not sure if I believe we should go all Hunger Games on them. Prison works just fine for me when they commit crimes sufficiently egregious.
So you are born, and then immediately go to prison? Wouldn't it be more humane to euthanize them at birth? Isn't this a way to achieve the goal of eugenics?
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.
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.
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.
>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?
Works for me with VPN enabled. Might just be your IP is blocked.
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-...
Thanks, That worked.
The irony is it doesn't work for me no matter what I do now.
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We've banned this account. This is not what HN is for and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> 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.
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Whatever country you live in, I guarantee you have homegrown criminals from your culture too.
remember, this is the worst AI is going to be...
just finally start treating them as terrorists and airstrike them.
We need to get over the idea that criminals and geopolitical aggressors have human rights. Human rights should only be afforded to the law-abiding.
Aside from the fact that this would be a despicable crime, how would you even go about identifying where a given scammer operation has its office buildings?
this sounds like a reasonable thing to do to a human being working in a call center /s
The Internet fuels 100% of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge.
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
This isn't a useful story without any information about the scam. Received an email, then what? Was actual cash lost or the item being sold?
I feel any criminal is a big beneficiary of AI. Its something that's not being talked enough by the big AI players who are just chasing profit by burning books, consuming water, promising people getting thrown out of jobs and of course productivity. Now that the cat's out of the bag I don't event see a way to limit all the negative net effects that will ripple through society.
From a profitable prediction markets trader:
> "Prediction: in 1-2 years, almost everyone will agree that open sourcing the best AIs is totally crazy as the AIs become capable of autonomous hacking of most humans and institutions, serious terrorism and creation of biological weapons, etc."
https://xcancel.com/SemioticRivalry/status/20815246004504824...
How would you validate that? An opinion survey? Of whom?
There’s little to no reason why someone from Africa should be able to make a call to the first world. It should be either extremely expensive or simply impossible.
Can you elaborate? In the spirit of the rules of HN I'm trying to assume good faith and trying to conjure the strongest plausible interpretation of what you wrote, but I'm drawing a blank.
You can’t make it expensive enough to stop scammers, while not too expensive to impede legitimate calls like businesses, family overseas, or tourists calling home.
There is a very high volume of legitimate calls from Africa, and scammers actually have tons of capital to work with.
And this does not even get into the technical difficulty of defining and detecting a “call” “from” Africa. Voice can be tunneled to U.S. infrastructure and then passed to telephony carriers as a “domestic call.”
I wish they implemented this for a week so you could experience first hand the consequences of your ignorance when everything stopped working.
If it’s a legitimate commercial relation (like a mining operation) they won’t have any issues paying the price or setting up alternate communication channels.
Their idea is bad but this rebuttal makes even less sense.