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AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol

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Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol

#91

Post by gruez »

jackvalentine wrote: post #36
gruez wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol

#92

Post by Cider9986 »

Cybercrime is helped by the massive amount of static identifiers big tech and the internet uses and their refusal to shift away from them.

Privacy focused solutions prevent the leaks which enable many scammers, and yet governments respond by demanding more identifiers be added everywhere, which perpetuates the leaks. I've not gotten a single spam message on Signal with their phone number privacy settings and username usage. You can change your username whenever you want.

Google should add email aliasing and encourage it. They could detect and alert users if an email that comes to an alias is from a different sender than the first email to that alias.

Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol

#93

Post by spydum »

asdfman123 wrote: post #43
merelydev wrote: post #6

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

Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol

#94

Post by karim79 »

Nition wrote: post #84
karim79 wrote: post #25

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…

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.

Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol

#95

Post by BLKNSLVR »

Nition wrote: post #77
SchemaLoad wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol

#96

Post by Nition »

karim79 wrote: post #94
Nition wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol

#97

Post by BLKNSLVR »

UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #78
userbinator wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

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.

Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol

#98

Post by antonvs »

LocalH wrote: post #7
merelydev wrote: post #6

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.

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 origin…

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.

Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol

#99

Post by cjbgkagh »

ElProlactin wrote: post #85
cjbgkagh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

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.

Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol

#100

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

gpt5 wrote: post #49
ElProlactin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

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.

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

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