AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
africanews.com292 points by bookofjoe 2 days ago
292 points by bookofjoe 2 days ago
https://www.interpol.int/Media/Documents/Publications/Cyberc...
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. 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. >>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? What I meant is in a lot of these compounds in Africa the “workers” are doing this willingly, it is a Job like a 9-5, these are locals who go there to get trained to do this. In other places like Malaysia, Cambodia most of these people ( usually foreigners) are enticed into these Jobs , they get to these countries with the promise of normal employment and find themselves forced into this.
In many of the African countries these are now locals working in Chinese companies, trained by Chinese and protected by corrupt government officials. My understanding is that while the stories of foreigners being kidnapped to work in a pig butchering compound are much more likely to make international news, the reality on the ground is that the vast majority of people working these scams are not slaves. They are employees in a criminal syndicate. Yup, this is usually the case in pig butchering operations iirc. What, if I assume we're employing nicknames here, is a pig butchering operation? Any scam where the scammer maintains a long-term relationship with the victim - fattening them up - before suddenly taking all their money. For example a romance scam where the scammer pretends to be your girlfriend who loves you for 6 months and then asks for money to cover an emergency. Or a stock market scam that might even pay out small profits before convincing you to go all in. Some kind of romance scam. Look it up. But what do pigs have to do with any of that? I'd assume because pigs have to be fattened before slaughter. At the small scale by literally throwing them scraps (pigs eat nearly anything edible). Meanwhile in a pig butchering scam you have emotionally desperate people (who often would go for figurative scraps) being fed fake romance before being slaughtered (having a lot of money extracted from them, which usually ends in the end of the fake relationship as results don't materialize for the victim, e.g. the lover not showing up) It’s an English translation of a Chinese phrase. The method began in China before it came to the west.
“shā zhū pán (杀猪盘) translates literally to "killing pig plate" or "pig slaughter table”. It's just analogy which is useful to depict process well: pig needs to be fed and taken care of for some time before it's butchered Because when you buy a live pig, you don't just slaughter and eat it right away, you have to fatten it up over a period of time and then you slaughter it and have a feast. A typical scam is more like fishing, where you catch a fish and then eat it right away. Pig butchering requires a prolonged relationship with the victim to get a higher payout for more work. I read it as asserting that unlike in Asia, people do this work willingly. Which I don't actually believe: if you couldn't find qualified people for this work in Cambodia, how are you going to find them in Africa? According to some news report """
The global spread of the syndicates’ operations has been driven in part by pressure from authorities in Southeast Asia. A major crackdown on scam centres in Myanmar this year, pushed by Beijing, led to around 7,000 workers from at least two dozen countries being freed. But the UN report warns that while such efforts disrupt the scam gangs’ immediate activities, they have shown themselves able to adapt and relocate swiftly. ‘It spreads like a cancer,’ UNODC’s Hoffman said. ‘Authorities treat it in one area, but the roots never disappear, they simply migrate.’
""" These criminals may even belong to the same groups that were targeted by law enforcement in Southeast Asia. they do not actually need to recruit local people. They only need to use advertisements for high-paying “overseas jobs” to attract people with the necessary technical skills and capabilities. Why do you call them “labs”? A "lab" is a place to experiment and grow. That the subject to experiment and grow with would be "crime" is a reasonable extension of the word, I suppose... 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. Even simpler: I wish banks would allow you to set up a requirement of MFA for transactions over a certain amount (with everyone's consent of course). My parents are not yet a concern for this stuff, but I imagine eventually they might be. So I would get a notification on my phone to approve the transaction/withdrawal. 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. It would be great if not for the fact that at least over here in the UK your doctor or anyone from the NHS will always call you from a restricted number. So especially if you're elderly and have regular check ups or anything medical going on, the advice to "only answer known numbers" falls apart. And in my experience NHS receptionists have zero patience for the whole "tell me why you're calling" automated screens too, they just disconnect straight away. Legitimate actors perusing poor security policies is actually the biggest threat vector. Yeah, I think thats a valid edge case - and a manageable one. If you are expecting a call from a doctor, lift the firewall for a while. It gets a bit more complicated than that. I don't even regularly need things from my doctor, but I have a referral to a specialist right now, and the waiting time is around 16 months to be contacted by them. At that time they will randomly call me from a restricted number. So I must have all call screening and blocking off for probably 2 years in order to accommodate this. And I can't time it because in the past I was referred to a different one and they contacted me in only 4 months when they said 12+. Had similar situation here in the US -- though with a more tolerable delay -- with a private health care provider. The fix of course is an enforced requirement from higher authority that health care providers communicate only by means that prove identity of the source -- never calling from an unverifiable number. How to make that happen, though ... ? This doesn’t work for older folks. They have medical providers constantly randomly reaching out. Typically medication changes or reminding them it’s time to come do labs or whatever. That and trying to walk my parents through turning this sort of thing on already was a 3 hour long process. That they will in no way remember even with a checklist. There is unlikely going to be a technical way to solve this social problem, as is usually the case. Personal assistants in the Philippines and hope they don’t scam you themselves 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." Easier said than done.
One of most popular scam here is a scammer using deepfake/ai calling victim saying there was serious accident to one of victim's relative and they need money for hospital (that's how it works here, money for proper caring). The victim would be panic and send the money. Usually, the scammer will think of a scenario that give the victim very limited time to stop and think, or put them in the state that fear takes over their mind You just gave me an idea... Let's all pitch in and spread the cost of health care around. Average it out so no one gets left behind. In places where we have that the scam is just money for transport, utilities, or whatever. Something has happened which means they cannot access their money and make the usual payment. We actually had an experience with a bank fraud team recently and they relentlessly ask over and over "is the recipient in financial difficulty?". They're not passing judgement on them but trying to work out if you've been convinced that they are and you need to send them money [urgently] to help. My aunt was recently hit by this scam, they used a deep fake of a teenager and she really believed it was my cousin. The lie was that he was stuck in Montreal and needed money for the next flight home. This happened in Canada. I don’t think having socialized healthcare makes as much of a difference as one would hope. The problem is that many scammers now groom your brain into trusting them before they even mention money. This is a psychological thing where you can’t necessarily just tell yourself “I’m not going to fall for that.” There are reports from professional scambaiters who, after engaging with a phone scammer for a while, found themselves inexplicably clinging to the belief the scheme was real. This is possibly due to how our brains are wired to trust an already-established narrative and due to the effect that repeated interactions have on trust. When the scammer eventually steers the topic towards money, phenomena such as the Semmelweis reflex [0] may have already kicked in, which can make it super difficult to re-frame the person as a scammer. That is completely impractical for most people. Say what?! It sounds extremely obvious and infinitely practical. How often are you (or your parents) legitimately asked for money via email / internet? I mean, my answer is: never. My parents' answer is: never. My parents-in-law answer is: never. Great if that works for you. Asking for money is common over voice or whatsapp in some countries for things like medical care, funerals, weddings, police "fines", school fees etc. Yeah, fair point, it's pretty well outside normal for me (there's a world outside of my lived experience? Nah!) The scams have to be culturally relevant to be effective, which is why they set out wide bets looking to see what sticks with a fairly small target audience. An addendum is don't give money when you're called by a "legitimate contact", call them back first. The scammer is remote so they can pretend to be the "legitimate contact" but not so easy to block the real legitimate contact from being contacted for validation. The scam is usually a phone call from a loved one in jail or the hospital. It immediately creates a sense of panic and fully explains the random phone number. The voice doesn't have to sound like you either. This is where "security questions" can be useful; neither the question nor answer need to be real, and the more outrageous the better. "You're my daughter? Then tell me the name of your twelth pet centipede." For voice scams this is critical. I set up duress codes with all of my non technical and elderly family and close friends last year. It should be a simple, pink-elephant-type nonsense question and answer that you rehearse a few times in person and make sure they never share with others. “Q: What’s your favorite leprechaun? A: Rutabaga” or something. Even cognitively impaired folks can, with a few rehearsals over a day or so, retain that easily, I’ve found. Reminding them to practice it when people reach out pretending to be me takes a bit more rehearsal, but I’ve found that it sticks reliably even then. 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. 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. 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. so the solution in this brave new world is to preemptively fill the gap with benevolent chatbot penpals? As an alternative to actually talking for them and being near them, maaaaaybe. Though, at that point you're introducing trust to something that attackers might learn to emulate enough to make it part of the scam one day. The solution is that in the West, many Boomers are isolated from their families because many of us move for work or college. Get them some friends, a community, a local shuffleboard group or something so they're not so desperate for any connection that they answer every phone call and email with desperation. I assume AI assistants would be able to prevent a lot of this It's an intriguing idea, but prompt injection and misleading the AI seem like fairly trivial things to do right? I dont think so. The LLMs are trained to play it safe and avoid responsibility for hard decisions. No commercial model will say "No, I wont connect your call, I dont think you are bleeding to death at this moment, I believe you are a scammer". Nope. > 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. 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'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 No. The paper is about reducing a set, as far as I understand. It's not about mistakes. It's about the deliberacy of basically squeezing out the individuals who are vulnerable and who do not see the signs of being scammed. Yes but ascribing those motivations is a guess. There's no actual scammer saying they are doing that vs. it just being a fairly unsophisticated scam. It might be the reason, but the paper provides no actual proof, and as far as I've been able to find, neither has anyone else in the decade since. Just a whole lot of people repeating the theory as fact. I'll take your point and rabbit hole it a bit sir. If you find actual proof - even a friend of a friend saying they once heard it from a real scammer - I'd love to see it. I used to bait 419 scammers. Weirdly enough I actually befriended a couple of them. That was about 20 years ago. They were full on and shameless but when exposed they became more human and even sympathetic and I dropped my guard and told them what I was doing. One of them said, and I'll never forget, "Thank you for being reasonable". I had a friend who had a similar experience with a dating site scammer. The guy dropped the act and admitted he was operating out of Africa (I forget the country) and was not proud of what he was doing but did so out of desperation. He told my friend of his living situation, rampant poverty of his country and little to no hope of a future. That small conversation stuck with my friend. The stuff does stick because it's literally connecting with humans who are hard done by and it's always affecting. It's really sad.
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