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- Hacker News
- 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.
- 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.
by merelydev - The main fuel is the "need" to have browsers that can execute code, coupled with the ability to transfer money via the internet. JavaScript was a mistake, e-commerce was a mistake, and so is everything else that came after.
Let's ask Vint Cerf whether the web was meant to run logic, or just be a document format. I bet no matter what he answers, the world would be like the GIF pronunciation "I don't care if the original creator said it's pronounced like giraffe, I'm gonna say it like gift because I KnOw BeTtEr"
Internet 3 when (because I know that academia does already have an "Internet 2", although I bet due to Internet 1 security issues, Internet 2 is already compromised too)
by LocalH - the point though of a proper scam is to filter out the believables and find the guillibles.
You don't exactly want convincing evidence; you want a good story.
by cyanydeez - That's like calling stones fuel for violence. It's everyone's choice what they use the internet or stones for.by Nathanba
- With all the Nigerian princes out there, you'd think one of the bastards would have already made an official claim to the throne.by grg0
- 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.by alpaca9
- It's been used for defense for a long time. AI is why spam filters started actually working in the 2000s.by asdfman123
- 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.
by Cider9986 - 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
by Razengan - > Why not use AI to detect and avoid scams?
Why would the scammer go thru your detector?
by j16sdiz - This can backfire and they would go back to kidnapping people. Or they will humanize their ai.by alightsoul
- That goes beside the point. Scammers probably boosted more their scams with AI than developers boosted their deliveries.
- 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.
by navs - You’re on a social media site filled mostly with AI bots right now. Try saying something negative about China in any thread
- Coincidentally it’s also the biggest scam in the west. Wait till the IPO and the inevitable 80% stock drop of OpenAI ….
- Do you plan to bet on this by buying PUTs? Should be easy money, right? /sby slig
- When the majority of a decades-long-scams' victims are Boomers getting hacked with AIs (clearing out your possibly-lesser inheritances)... does it still matter if the /u/usernametake29s of this world are still stuck thinking LLMs are "a scam" ? Still?
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This thought-provoker is 100% human-derived.
#They'reMadeOutOfWeights
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I didn't even realize how serious I was being, back in late 2022, when I was telling my Boomer friends (twice my age, but still closer than most "family") "make sure if you're grand-daugther calls 'begging for her life,' you need to ask the kidnappers something only she would know – and then *you can never ask that same question again (for verification, at least; ask whatever you want).
We are here.
- 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.by spiderfarmer
- 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.
- I simply don't answer calls from unknown numbers. I feel like it's my right as a grown-up.by karim79
- 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
by karim79 - I had a bash with that paper. It is pure and utter tosh - I started with the ... start and swiftly moved to 6. Conclusion.
"Thinking like an attacker is a skill rightly valued among defenders."
and
"Attacking as a business must identify targets, and this is easy only if we believe that attackers have solved a problem that has vexed multiple communities for decades."
Bollocks!
by gerdesj - > 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.
by cheriot - 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 Nition - 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).
by paganel - 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?
by cheriot - 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.
by carlosjobim - 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.
by 3RTB297