back
248 comments
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.
Chinese criminal syndicates have even begun to conduct lure and abduct Indians into scamming centres. They do this by posting fraudulent online job ads leading Indians to clandestine compounds in the golden triangle nations. And then confiscate passports after they arrive, restrain them and then enslave them using threats of physical torture, electric shocks, and isolation cells.

Why do they even bother with India ? Easy manpower and one of the world's largest English speaking nations.

>>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 won't discount the possibility of someone getting into this of their own free will out of hand. But I seriously doubt that it's going to remain this way long term. We have recent examples from Cambodia and Myanmar after all.
Why do you call them “labs”?
Malaysia prison. Man I would weigh things out.
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?

"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.

Encourage them to move their money to where it's at least more difficult to access.

Recently I discovered that my mam – a middle-class ex-civil-servant, not rich, but not poor – had £++ sitting in the account that was linked to the Visa card she carries around all day. Why? Just because she hadn't moved it elsewhere. Terrifying, obviously.

All she needed was my encouragement. I think it's in Premium Bonds now: not scam-proof, but at least not trivially scammable.

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.

The advice I gave to my folks -- hard ignore any contact attempts not initiated by them. Dont read, dont answer the phone except from recognized numbers. I think thats the only way. No legitimate businesses call or text people out of the blue these days.

I dont believe in AI voice assistants picking up phones and filtering scammers. Those tbings will fight a losing game considering how the mainstream LLMs are built.

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."

I had a similar problem with phone scams for my elder parents. Installed Asterisk with a Raspberry on their land line to allow only whitelisted numbers and the problem was solved. I guess someone has to step in at some point. Problem is not every parent has a tech literate child and the industry doesn’t seem to bother to offer decent solutions. All call blocker hardware that I found didn’t allow whitelist functionality. I guess there’s a business opportunity here easily, build hardware/software solutions to protect the elderly.
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.

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.

I assume AI assistants would be able to prevent a lot of this
> Is there any way to help the elderly navigate this shift?

You can become a legal guardian, and/or get access and shared ownership on their bank account and monitor it constantly. But yeah , it's a hassle.

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.

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

> since I know firsthand how realistic these things can seem

Happened to a person close to me a few months ago and, indeed, it has become uncannily realistic. I'm surprised it hasn't attracted the attention of the relevant authorities, because harmless people are now being scammed of their live savings (or worse, in the case of the person close to me she had actually borrowed the sum she was scammed of) and no-one seems to be doing anything. It's also highly regressive, as in it seems to affect the people that would most need that money (in a way it's similar to how gambling affects the lower classes a lot more compared to the wealthy).

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 true.[1]

[1] As another example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi

> By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.

There's less need to identify the most gullible when AI drops the incremental cost of responding closer to zero.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.
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?
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

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

AI companies should be held liable for this.
Crypto and now AI, every new tech we make these days it seems the main utility is just to enable criminals
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.

remember, this is the worst AI is going to be...
just finally start treating them as terrorists and airstrike them.
The Internet fuels 100% of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge.
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
I feel any criminal is a big beneficiary of AI. Its something that's not being talked enough by the big AI players who are just chasing profit by burning books, consuming water, promising people getting thrown out of jobs and of course productivity. Now that the cat's out of the bag I don't event see a way to limit all the negative net effects that will ripple through society.
From a profitable prediction markets trader:

> "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’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.