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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.”
39 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 2.8 ms ] threadThere'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
Page 24 is where the AI stuff starts being described in detail.
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.
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
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Edit: Recalled -> Recall
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
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
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45580981
Is there any way to help the elderly navigate this shift?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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...
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.”