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

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.

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

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

Coincidentally it’s also the biggest scam in the west. Wait till the IPO and the inevitable 80% stock drop of OpenAI ….

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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Crypto and now AI, every new tech we make these days it seems the main utility is just to enable criminals

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

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