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?
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
#192Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
#193Earlier 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.
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.
Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>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?
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.
Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
#195Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
#197Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Re: AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yet another instance of when something from the field of AI actually works, it stops being called AI.