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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

#141

Post by karim79 »

MisterTea wrote: post #130
karim79 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#142

Post by normie3000 »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #97
UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#143

Post by kazinator »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #131
kazinator wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 , . 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.

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

#144

Post by madradavid »

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.

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

#145

Post by 3RTB297 »

cheriot wrote: post #72

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?

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.

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

#146

Post by usernametaken29 »

asdfman123 wrote: post #40
spiderfarmer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He can keep the scam going for a long time but not forever.

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

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

#147

Post by ElProlactin »

croes wrote: post #140
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.

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?

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

#148

Post by BLKNSLVR »

normie3000 wrote: post #142
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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!)

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

#149

Post by karim79 »

Jach wrote: post #139
grg0 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

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.

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

#150

Post by hnav »

3RTB297 wrote: post #145
cheriot wrote: post #72

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?

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 a…

so the solution in this brave new world is to preemptively fill the gap with benevolent chatbot penpals?
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