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?
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."
How so? For me the point of the paper is the elimination of the ones who will not fall for such a scam in the first place. The title of the paper says it all.
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)
Douglas Adams put the source of the rot a bit further back:
> This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.
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.
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
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?
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.
It's already burst in South Korea when China showed they can make memory chips too. And it would have burst by now in the US if OpenAI and Anthropic were public.
Tesla is imo overvalued and has been for a long time. Its bankrupted a lot of pretty savvy investors in the last 10 years trying to short them because its obviously over valued. Market irrationality vs solvency and all of that.
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.
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
> Ethics, morals and whatever people call only exists if economy is stable.
What is a "stable" economy? The US has the world's largest GDP, the highest nominal GDP per capita of any nation with a population over 10 million, the highest amount of investable and liquid private assets of any country in the world, more than a third of the world's millionaires, etc.
And yet I think you'd have a hard time convincing most people that the US is a bastion of ethics and morals.
Rich countries have created a definition that makes it a poor country thing, conveniently ignoring the type of corruption that is institutionalized (and in some cases even legalized) in many rich countries.
The point of institutionalizing corruption is to reduce competition from competing corruption entities. Which is bad but not as bad as an endemically corrupt society.
I think it can be true that we have in effect far more corruption in the west than what is readily recognized at the same time that it’s true that we have less corruption than most other countries.
I think what the Trump admin is doing is horribly corrupt and I hope the lot of them go to jail for that and other things, but in relative terms what Trump is doing is still less corrupt than what happens in many poor countries.
Same for global migrants issues..as long as people in dirt poor/war torn/unstable countries can watch tik toks of fat people dancing and crying about first world problems while they starve on the streets or deal with gangs and infrastructure issues we will have migrant problem.. we live in a hyperconnected world these days
Viewing the world as haves and have nots and building giant Walls and moats and hyper-capitalism alone will never solve this..
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
I'm not sure that's a very comforting comparison: It's not clear that guns have that level of deterrent effect, and a world where everyone is shooting ar everyone else with guns is supremely wasteful.
Better to strike at the root of the LLM-scam business model wherever we can.
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.
So deepfakes and “AI was also used to generate synthetic identities that bypassed KYC checks, craft hyper-personalized phishing lures tailored to individual victims, and produce AI-driven malware capable of evading signature-based detection.”
Our most vulnerable must be getting absolutely hammered by scams. Is anyone working on protecting e.g. elderly people from social engineering? I feel like banks should be proactively suggesting people have a second family member or fiduciary sign off on risky transactions like wiring money to new accounts or pulling out a ton of cash.
I was recently on the phone with a very articulate member of my banks fraud department, or at least I believed they were up until they asked for my two factor code to reset my account. They had visibility into some past legitimate wire transfers which they asked me about along with a fictitious fraudulent one that they “blocked“, and when I pushed back against giving them my two factor code, they had a whole script prepared about needing to freeze my account until I went to a branch with four forms of identification (or just give us the two factor code and avoid the hassle). An acquaintance wired their down payment to a scammer after the real estate firms email system was compromised and scammer inserted their own wire instructions.
Not to mention reports of mythos directly hacking into banking systems. Scary times.
Dunno first time I have ever been on that domain, I think the direct link to the PDF gets you blacklisted, I can navigate the rest of the site just fine.
The PDF is linked here, which you can get to this article from the front page:
> You know about the values of a culture, if they call your old parents to rip them off.
Large groups of people in a poor country steal from rich countries, and your explanation is a morally corrupt culture? not the obviously extremely poor prospects of it's citizens?
> They have none, or worse they can talk themselves into this "Robin Hood" psychosis, where stealing the pension from the elderly is just fine, because they are part of the upper crust of the world.
You're describing a cartoon character. Most of these people are trying to survive, not make some kind of twisted moral stand. Please try to recognise the privilege your place of birth affords you and how much of a global minority you are in. Incentives are everything here.
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.
>AI will be the one to cause the next financial crisis.
So what's the implication here? It sounds like you want AI canceled or curtailed, and if you apply the same logic to the internet in the mid 90s, you would have correctly called out the dotcom bubble. Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?
Late 90s/early 00s internet would've probably been the sweet spot for utility while causing little harm. Sadly we can't just freeze the internet in time.
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
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?
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 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!
How so? For me the point of the paper is the elimination of the ones who will not fall for such a scam in the first place. The title of the paper says it all.
Are we talking about the same thing?
Bash = tried Tosh = nonsense Bollocks = also nonsense
Fair enough man. I didn't write the paper no need to hate on me sir.
(Parent’s helpfully defining the Britishisms for HN readers)
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 been used for defense for a long time. AI is why spam filters started actually working in the 2000s.
different kind of AI
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.
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)
> JavaScript was a mistake, e-commerce was a mistake, and so is everything else that came after.
That’s a really extreme take that lacks any nuance.
Might as well blame the OS as well for allowing any custom code to be executed.
Douglas Adams put the source of the rot a bit further back:
> This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.
The first Nigerian Prince scams started over email.
Mayhaps. But Spanish prisoner letters were known much before that. Which is basically the same advance fee scam but with a different cover story.
Here is a story which describes one such letter from 1913: https://web.archive.org/web/20020815055745/http://www.samizd...
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.
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 ….
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?
----
This thought-provoker is 100% human-derived.
#They'reMadeOutOfWeights
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.
People buying shares at a given price does not necessarily mean they believe the company is worth that much
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
It's already burst in South Korea when China showed they can make memory chips too. And it would have burst by now in the US if OpenAI and Anthropic were public.
He can keep the scam going for a long time but not forever.
It is only a matter of time until China can make everything needed for sub 8nm chips in their own country. Maybe 10 years away, but it is inevitable.
Do you plan to bet on this by buying PUTs? Should be easy money, right? /s
Tesla is imo overvalued and has been for a long time. Its bankrupted a lot of pretty savvy investors in the last 10 years trying to short them because its obviously over valued. Market irrationality vs solvency and all of that.
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.
OpenAI isn’t public so… /s
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
> Ethics, morals and whatever people call only exists if economy is stable.
What is a "stable" economy? The US has the world's largest GDP, the highest nominal GDP per capita of any nation with a population over 10 million, the highest amount of investable and liquid private assets of any country in the world, more than a third of the world's millionaires, etc.
And yet I think you'd have a hard time convincing most people that the US is a bastion of ethics and morals.
Poor countries have a significantly higher rate of corruption, which means that the government itself is part of the crime syndications.
It is true that we see correlation between richer countries and lower level of crimes - across all layers of society.
This really depends on how you define corruption.
Rich countries have created a definition that makes it a poor country thing, conveniently ignoring the type of corruption that is institutionalized (and in some cases even legalized) in many rich countries.
The point of institutionalizing corruption is to reduce competition from competing corruption entities. Which is bad but not as bad as an endemically corrupt society.
I think it can be true that we have in effect far more corruption in the west than what is readily recognized at the same time that it’s true that we have less corruption than most other countries.
The current administration is giving them a run for the money. Might come out ahead in regards regards to corruption too. Number one.
I think what the Trump admin is doing is horribly corrupt and I hope the lot of them go to jail for that and other things, but in relative terms what Trump is doing is still less corrupt than what happens in many poor countries.
Same for global migrants issues..as long as people in dirt poor/war torn/unstable countries can watch tik toks of fat people dancing and crying about first world problems while they starve on the streets or deal with gangs and infrastructure issues we will have migrant problem.. we live in a hyperconnected world these days
Viewing the world as haves and have nots and building giant Walls and moats and hyper-capitalism alone will never solve this..
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
> Why not use AI to detect and avoid scams?
Why would the scammer go thru your detector?
How would the scammer communicate with you?
Phone? The network could spot sources exhibiting robocall patterns. AI could analyze live conversations and warn the recipient on certain patterns.
Instant messaging? There's spam and abuse screening built into most IMs already. AI could [locally/privately] analyze conversations.
Email? Ditto; analyze conversations, a bit deeper than basic junk mail filters already do.
That goes beside the point. Scammers probably boosted more their scams with AI than developers boosted their deliveries.
Again, AI can also be the solution. Just like the guns vs guns argument yeah?
Chinese models are going to keep getting stronger. Maybe the Free World™ should increase their people's access to and education about AI too.
I'm not sure that's a very comforting comparison: It's not clear that guns have that level of deterrent effect, and a world where everyone is shooting ar everyone else with guns is supremely wasteful.
Better to strike at the root of the LLM-scam business model wherever we can.
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.
So deepfakes and “AI was also used to generate synthetic identities that bypassed KYC checks, craft hyper-personalized phishing lures tailored to individual victims, and produce AI-driven malware capable of evading signature-based detection.”
Our most vulnerable must be getting absolutely hammered by scams. Is anyone working on protecting e.g. elderly people from social engineering? I feel like banks should be proactively suggesting people have a second family member or fiduciary sign off on risky transactions like wiring money to new accounts or pulling out a ton of cash.
I was recently on the phone with a very articulate member of my banks fraud department, or at least I believed they were up until they asked for my two factor code to reset my account. They had visibility into some past legitimate wire transfers which they asked me about along with a fictitious fraudulent one that they “blocked“, and when I pushed back against giving them my two factor code, they had a whole script prepared about needing to freeze my account until I went to a branch with four forms of identification (or just give us the two factor code and avoid the hassle). An acquaintance wired their down payment to a scammer after the real estate firms email system was compromised and scammer inserted their own wire instructions.
Not to mention reports of mythos directly hacking into banking systems. Scary times.
>Access to this site was denied for security reasons. Please contact your network or system administrator
Is what I see. Which makes sense I guess. Maybe just tell me how you got to the page?
Works for me with VPN enabled. Might just be your IP is blocked.
Dunno first time I have ever been on that domain, I think the direct link to the PDF gets you blacklisted, I can navigate the rest of the site just fine.
The PDF is linked here, which you can get to this article from the front page:
https://www.interpol.int/News-and-Events/News/2026/INTERPOL-...
Thanks, That worked.
The irony is it doesn't work for me no matter what I do now.
[flagged]
We've banned this account. This is not what HN is for and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> You know about the values of a culture, if they call your old parents to rip them off.
Large groups of people in a poor country steal from rich countries, and your explanation is a morally corrupt culture? not the obviously extremely poor prospects of it's citizens?
> They have none, or worse they can talk themselves into this "Robin Hood" psychosis, where stealing the pension from the elderly is just fine, because they are part of the upper crust of the world.
You're describing a cartoon character. Most of these people are trying to survive, not make some kind of twisted moral stand. Please try to recognise the privilege your place of birth affords you and how much of a global minority you are in. Incentives are everything here.
Whatever country you live in, I guarantee you have homegrown criminals from your culture too.
Crypto and now AI, every new tech we make these days it seems the main utility is just to enable criminals
In the old days porn peddlers were the pioneers of digital.
> Crypto and now AI, every new tech we make these days it seems the main utility is just to enable criminals ...
It's nearly as if there was a lesson here about some individuals in the human race?
What was that yet about psychos? That 1% of all humans, no matter the socio-economic class, no matter the parents, are just full-on psychopaths.
The question is: what do we do, as a society, about those who only want to harm others?
Sounds simple to me. Remove them from society.
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
>AI will be the one to cause the next financial crisis.
So what's the implication here? It sounds like you want AI canceled or curtailed, and if you apply the same logic to the internet in the mid 90s, you would have correctly called out the dotcom bubble. Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?
I don't think it's necessary to have wants or plans in place when you point out this kind of thing.
You should also be careful about taking imagined positions to the extreme ..."Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?"
> Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?
In retrospect, I think the world would be a much better place if we'd just turned it off in 1998.
Late 90s/early 00s internet would've probably been the sweet spot for utility while causing little harm. Sadly we can't just freeze the internet in time.
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