9 ms·

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

292 points by bookofjoe 3mo ago

https://www.interpol.int/Media/Documents/Publications/Cybercrime/African-Cyberthreat-Assessment-Report-2026 https://www.interpol.int/Media/Documents/Publications/Cyberc...

restlessforge 3mo ago
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
- paganel 3mo ago
  > 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).
usernametaken29 3mo ago
Coincidentally it’s also the biggest scam in the west. Wait till the IPO and the inevitable 80% stock drop of OpenAI ….
- spiderfarmer 3mo ago
  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.
  - asdfman123 3mo ago
    He can keep the scam going for a long time but not forever.
    - usernametaken29 3mo ago
      Looking at SPCX it lost half of its valuation in a month and the trajectory is only heading downwards. Out of the three expedited IPO requests (OpenAI, SPCX, Anthropoid) to the S&P 500 only SPCX was approved. The other two did not fulfill expedited IPO requirements. To recap, the only AI company (xAI) going into the market lost half of its valuation in a month, and the other players are tooo dodgy to enter. When they will eventually, boy will you see the bubble pop
    - carlosjobim 3mo ago
      Consider everything it takes in organization to be able to send rockets to space and bring them back. That kind of organization would be able to do anything. There is where the value is. The world is not static and people are not static.
  - SchemaLoad 3mo ago
    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.
    - Nition 3mo ago
      The SK stock market is still up 55% since the start of this year.
      - BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
        It is interesting looking at a long term chart how obvious that it was due for correction. Having said that, it's easy to say that after the correction because 'the top' is impossible to predict. But if investors hadn't been taking profits on the incline, then I have little sympathy for them skiing down the decline. (This is a harsh opinion, but people getting into investing should be doing it actively, not passively, ie. do some research, make a plan. Also, for those who are invested passively, long term, via ETFs, then they're still up 55% as @Nition says, so they're all good)
- slig 3mo ago
  Do you plan to bet on this by buying PUTs? Should be easy money, right? /s
  - amazingamazing 3mo ago
    OpenAI isn’t public so… /s
  - ecshafer 3mo ago
    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.
    - thenewnewguy 3mo ago
      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.
      - jerf 3mo ago
        IPOs experiencing significant drops after their IPO is not a crazy theory, it's pretty much the norm: https://potomacwealthmanagementllc.com/2026/03/04/underperforming-ipo-stocks/ 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.
        fadesibert 3mo ago
        Your instinct is correct. Options markets are wide following an IPO (ie there is a significant difference between the price at which a dealer will sell a specific option at a specific strike for a specific time). That tends to settle down ~60 days after trading, with seasonsed order flow, a realized volatility pattern, Observed volumes, open interest, liquidity in the stock (eg hedging becomes cheaper) and naturally - competition between market makers. Wide spreads are profitable for options dealers (and you need that profit to absorb losses where risk is misjudged or the stock is unpredictable) - but if two dealers are making excess profits offering wide markets in an option, a 3rd will join and undercut them. Source - I was a quant at a large investment bank, with ~5 years facing the Equity markets / 13 years across many desks and teams. Here's a chart of the last 20 IPOs with their Relative Spread (Bid + Offer / Midpoint) on each successive day of trading to show the tightening of spreads over time. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-bLekd5OonnrlEZyjRPNQYZmvnGZXigt/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-bLekd5OonnrlEZyjRPNQYZmvnG...
- ProllyInfamous 3mo ago
  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 ---- 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.
cineticdaffodil 3mo ago
[flagged]
- nkrisc 3mo ago
  Whatever country you live in, I guarantee you have homegrown criminals from your culture too.
- tomxor 3mo ago
  > 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.
  - cineticdaffodil 3mo ago
    [dead]
- tomhow 3mo ago
  We've banned this account. This is not what HN is for and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
simonw 3mo ago
Here's the report this story is about: https://www.interpol.int/Media/Documents/Publications/Cybercrime/African-Cyberthreat-Assessment-Report-2026 https://www.interpol.int/Media/Documents/Publications/Cyberc... (PDF) Page 24 is where the AI stuff starts being described in detail.
- bobajeff 3mo ago
  >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?
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - gruez 3mo ago
    Works for me with VPN enabled. Might just be your IP is blocked.
    - giancarlostoro 3mo ago
      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-report-finds-AI-linked-to-more-than-half-of-cybercrime-in-Africa https://www.interpol.int/News-and-Events/News/2026/INTERPOL-...
      - bobajeff 3mo ago
        Thanks, That worked.
        giancarlostoro 3mo ago
        The irony is it doesn't work for me no matter what I do now.
merelydev 3mo ago
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.
- LocalH 3mo ago
  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)
  - cyberax 3mo ago
    The first Nigerian Prince scams started over email.
    - krisoft 3mo ago
      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.samizdat.com/solovieff.html https://web.archive.org/web/20020815055745/http://www.samizd...
    - jamiek88 3mo ago
      Snail mail scams like that were common for decades prior. My mates dad nearly fell for one once.
  - stingraycharles 3mo ago
    > 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.
bad_haircut72 3mo ago
Crypto and now AI, every new tech we make these days it seems the main utility is just to enable criminals
- ryoshu 3mo ago
  In the old days porn peddlers were the pioneers of digital.
  - 55555 3mo ago
    Sure but porn is a separate category. It's not really a scam.
- TacticalCoder 3mo ago
  > 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?
  - knicholes 3mo ago
    Sounds simple to me. Remove them from society.
    - alightsoul 3mo ago
      So kill psychopaths? Or let them kill each other in their own remote island where they are banned or killed on arrival if they go to any other place?
      - knicholes 3mo ago
        I didn't say kill. Not sure if I believe we should go all Hunger Games on them. Prison works just fine for me when they commit crimes sufficiently egregious.
rvz 3mo ago
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 https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(25)00142-4
- gruez 3mo ago
  >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?
  - miyoji 3mo ago
    > 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.
    - boelboel 3mo ago
      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.
      - mrxtravgnt1 3mo ago
        Maybe the machines in the Matrix had it right when they said the "height of human civilization"
      - throwawayffffas 3mo ago
        Advance-fee scams have been around since the 18th century, internet is not required.
karim79 3mo ago
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/2016/02/WhyFromNigeria.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... Edit: Recalled -> Recall
- gerdesj 3mo ago
  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!
  - karim79 3mo ago
    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?
  - edot 3mo ago
    Bash = tried Tosh = nonsense Bollocks = also nonsense
    - karim79 3mo ago
      Fair enough man. I didn't write the paper no need to hate on me sir.
      - Barbing 3mo ago
        (Parent’s helpfully defining the Britishisms for HN readers)
        karim79 3mo ago
        As a British person I find this to be very very British.
baby 3mo ago
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
- Dylan16807 3mo ago
  This isn't a useful story without any information about the scam. Received an email, then what? Was actual cash lost or the item being sold?
motbus3 3mo ago
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
- AIorNot 3mo ago
  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..
- ElProlactin 3mo ago
  > 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.
  - gpt5 3mo ago
    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.
    - scns 3mo ago
      The current administration is giving them a run for the money. Might come out ahead in regards regards to corruption too. Number one.
navs 3mo ago
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.
- Helloworldboy 3mo ago
  You’re on a social media site filled mostly with AI bots right now. Try saying something negative about China in any thread
  - croes 3mo ago
    China is bad and Xi looks like Winnie the Pooh
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    If you pick Israel instead, it gets flagged much faster.
IncreasePosts 3mo ago
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.
Razengan 3mo ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45580981
- spiresofagartha 3mo ago
  That goes beside the point. Scammers probably boosted more their scams with AI than developers boosted their deliveries.
  - Razengan 3mo ago
    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.
    - Terr_ 3mo ago
      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.
      - chrisjj 3mo ago
        > deterrent "If you scam us, we'll scam, you back" ? I too am unconvinced.
- j16sdiz 3mo ago
  > Why not use AI to detect and avoid scams? Why would the scammer go thru your detector?
nicechianti 3mo ago
[dead]
cindyllm 3mo ago
[dead]
cheriot 3mo ago
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?
- userbinator 3mo ago
  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."
  - UqWBcuFx6NV4r 3mo ago
    That is completely impractical for most people.
    - tty456 3mo ago
      Why?
    - BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
      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.
      - infamouscow 3mo ago
        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.
        userbinator 3mo ago
        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."
aussieguy1234 3mo ago
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.
- karim79 3mo ago
  I simply don't answer calls from unknown numbers. I feel like it's my right as a grown-up.
  - abrowne 3mo ago
    Agreed. If they really want to get ahold of me they'll leave a voicemail. But I feel like I have to answer when my son is at school/camp.
    - grg0 3mo ago
      The scams do leave voicemails now, and they use voice genAI per the parent comment. If someone really wants to get a hold of you, they can knock on your door.
      - Jach 3mo ago
        Like I ever answer my door lol. But they can leave something in the mailbox, and I'll at least see the envelope in 1-30 days. Last week I finally had an onslaught of spam voicemails, several in an hour, that caused me to disable voicemail notifications altogether. I'll just check them when I'm expecting something now, similar to mail. My phone app was successfully filtering the calls so I wouldn't see them, but it still got routed to voicemail which then created a notification.
        karim79 3mo ago
        Disable! Voicemails are nothing. If something is important it's delivered via text/app or email. Voice stuff is just narcissists trying to get their way.
Cider9986 3mo ago
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.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
madradavid 3mo ago
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.
- gambiting 3mo ago
  >>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?
  - jsunderland323 3mo ago
    Yup, this is usually the case in pig butchering operations iirc.
    - UnreachableCode 3mo ago
      What, if I assume we're employing nicknames here, is a pig butchering operation?
      - aswegs8 3mo ago
        Some kind of romance scam. Look it up.
        shevy-java 3mo ago
energy123 3mo ago
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/2081524600450482452 https://xcancel.com/SemioticRivalry/status/20815246004504824...
- tantalor 3mo ago
  How would you validate that? An opinion survey? Of whom?
bsian 3mo ago
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.
- iammrpayments 3mo ago
  I wish they implemented this for a week so you could experience first hand the consequences of your ignorance when everything stopped working.
  - bsian 3mo ago
    If it’s a legitimate commercial relation (like a mining operation) they won’t have any issues paying the price or setting up alternate communication channels.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
  - Dylan16807 3mo ago
    Their idea is bad but this rebuttal makes even less sense.
- fercircularbuf 3mo ago
  Can you elaborate? In the spirit of the rules of HN I'm trying to assume good faith and trying to conjure the strongest plausible interpretation of what you wrote, but I'm drawing a blank.
- snowwrestler 3mo ago
  You can’t make it expensive enough to stop scammers, while not too expensive to impede legitimate calls like businesses, family overseas, or tourists calling home. There is a very high volume of legitimate calls from Africa, and scammers actually have tons of capital to work with. And this does not even get into the technical difficulty of defining and detecting a “call” “from” Africa. Voice can be tunneled to U.S. infrastructure and then passed to telephony carriers as a “domestic call.”
Zoadian 3mo ago
just finally start treating them as terrorists and airstrike them.
- Hackbraten 3mo ago
  Aside from the fact that this would be a despicable crime, how would you even go about identifying where a given scammer operation has its office buildings?
- MichaelGlass 3mo ago
  this sounds like a reasonable thing to do to a human being working in a call center /s
- somelamer567 3mo ago
  We need to get over the idea that criminals and geopolitical aggressors have human rights. Human rights should only be afforded to the law-abiding.
pixlmint 3mo ago
remember, this is the worst AI is going to be...
shevy-java 3mo ago
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?
crnkofe 3mo ago
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.
VortexLain 3mo ago
The Internet fuels 100% of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge.
smcg 3mo ago
AI companies should be held liable for this.

292 points by bookofjoe 3mo ago

https://www.interpol.int/Media/Documents/Publications/Cybercrime/African-Cyberthreat-Assessment-Report-2026 https://www.interpol.int/Media/Documents/Publications/Cyberc...

restlessforge 3mo ago

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

paganel 3mo ago
> 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).

usernametaken29 3mo ago

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

spiderfarmer 3mo ago
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.
- asdfman123 3mo ago
  He can keep the scam going for a long time but not forever.
  - usernametaken29 3mo ago
    Looking at SPCX it lost half of its valuation in a month and the trajectory is only heading downwards. Out of the three expedited IPO requests (OpenAI, SPCX, Anthropoid) to the S&P 500 only SPCX was approved. The other two did not fulfill expedited IPO requirements. To recap, the only AI company (xAI) going into the market lost half of its valuation in a month, and the other players are tooo dodgy to enter. When they will eventually, boy will you see the bubble pop
  - carlosjobim 3mo ago
    Consider everything it takes in organization to be able to send rockets to space and bring them back. That kind of organization would be able to do anything. There is where the value is. The world is not static and people are not static.
- SchemaLoad 3mo ago
  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.
  - Nition 3mo ago
    The SK stock market is still up 55% since the start of this year.
    - BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
      It is interesting looking at a long term chart how obvious that it was due for correction. Having said that, it's easy to say that after the correction because 'the top' is impossible to predict. But if investors hadn't been taking profits on the incline, then I have little sympathy for them skiing down the decline. (This is a harsh opinion, but people getting into investing should be doing it actively, not passively, ie. do some research, make a plan. Also, for those who are invested passively, long term, via ETFs, then they're still up 55% as @Nition says, so they're all good)
slig 3mo ago
Do you plan to bet on this by buying PUTs? Should be easy money, right? /s
- amazingamazing 3mo ago
  OpenAI isn’t public so… /s
- ecshafer 3mo ago
  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.
  - thenewnewguy 3mo ago
    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.
    - jerf 3mo ago
      IPOs experiencing significant drops after their IPO is not a crazy theory, it's pretty much the norm: https://potomacwealthmanagementllc.com/2026/03/04/underperforming-ipo-stocks/ 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.
      - fadesibert 3mo ago
        Your instinct is correct. Options markets are wide following an IPO (ie there is a significant difference between the price at which a dealer will sell a specific option at a specific strike for a specific time). That tends to settle down ~60 days after trading, with seasonsed order flow, a realized volatility pattern, Observed volumes, open interest, liquidity in the stock (eg hedging becomes cheaper) and naturally - competition between market makers. Wide spreads are profitable for options dealers (and you need that profit to absorb losses where risk is misjudged or the stock is unpredictable) - but if two dealers are making excess profits offering wide markets in an option, a 3rd will join and undercut them. Source - I was a quant at a large investment bank, with ~5 years facing the Equity markets / 13 years across many desks and teams. Here's a chart of the last 20 IPOs with their Relative Spread (Bid + Offer / Midpoint) on each successive day of trading to show the tightening of spreads over time. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-bLekd5OonnrlEZyjRPNQYZmvnGZXigt/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-bLekd5OonnrlEZyjRPNQYZmvnG...
ProllyInfamous 3mo ago
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 ---- 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.

cineticdaffodil 3mo ago

[flagged]

nkrisc 3mo ago
Whatever country you live in, I guarantee you have homegrown criminals from your culture too.
tomxor 3mo ago
> 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.
- cineticdaffodil 3mo ago
  [dead]
tomhow 3mo ago
We've banned this account. This is not what HN is for and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

simonw 3mo ago

Here's the report this story is about: https://www.interpol.int/Media/Documents/Publications/Cybercrime/African-Cyberthreat-Assessment-Report-2026 https://www.interpol.int/Media/Documents/Publications/Cyberc... (PDF) Page 24 is where the AI stuff starts being described in detail.

bobajeff 3mo ago
>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?
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- gruez 3mo ago
  Works for me with VPN enabled. Might just be your IP is blocked.
  - giancarlostoro 3mo ago
    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-report-finds-AI-linked-to-more-than-half-of-cybercrime-in-Africa https://www.interpol.int/News-and-Events/News/2026/INTERPOL-...
    - bobajeff 3mo ago
      Thanks, That worked.
      - giancarlostoro 3mo ago
        The irony is it doesn't work for me no matter what I do now.

merelydev 3mo ago

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.

LocalH 3mo ago
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)
- cyberax 3mo ago
  The first Nigerian Prince scams started over email.
  - krisoft 3mo ago
    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.samizdat.com/solovieff.html https://web.archive.org/web/20020815055745/http://www.samizd...
  - jamiek88 3mo ago
    Snail mail scams like that were common for decades prior. My mates dad nearly fell for one once.
- stingraycharles 3mo ago
  > 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.

bad_haircut72 3mo ago

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

ryoshu 3mo ago
In the old days porn peddlers were the pioneers of digital.
- 55555 3mo ago
  Sure but porn is a separate category. It's not really a scam.
TacticalCoder 3mo ago
> 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?
- knicholes 3mo ago
  Sounds simple to me. Remove them from society.
  - alightsoul 3mo ago
    So kill psychopaths? Or let them kill each other in their own remote island where they are banned or killed on arrival if they go to any other place?
    - knicholes 3mo ago
      I didn't say kill. Not sure if I believe we should go all Hunger Games on them. Prison works just fine for me when they commit crimes sufficiently egregious.

rvz 3mo ago

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 https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(25)00142-4

gruez 3mo ago
>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?
- miyoji 3mo ago
  > 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.
  - boelboel 3mo ago
    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.
    - mrxtravgnt1 3mo ago
      Maybe the machines in the Matrix had it right when they said the "height of human civilization"
    - throwawayffffas 3mo ago
      Advance-fee scams have been around since the 18th century, internet is not required.

karim79 3mo ago

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/2016/02/WhyFromNigeria.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... Edit: Recalled -> Recall

gerdesj 3mo ago
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!
- karim79 3mo ago
  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?
- edot 3mo ago
  Bash = tried Tosh = nonsense Bollocks = also nonsense
  - karim79 3mo ago
    Fair enough man. I didn't write the paper no need to hate on me sir.
    - Barbing 3mo ago
      (Parent’s helpfully defining the Britishisms for HN readers)
      - karim79 3mo ago
        As a British person I find this to be very very British.

baby 3mo ago

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

Dylan16807 3mo ago
This isn't a useful story without any information about the scam. Received an email, then what? Was actual cash lost or the item being sold?

motbus3 3mo ago

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

AIorNot 3mo ago
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..
ElProlactin 3mo ago
> 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.
- gpt5 3mo ago
  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.
  - scns 3mo ago
    The current administration is giving them a run for the money. Might come out ahead in regards regards to corruption too. Number one.

navs 3mo ago

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.

Helloworldboy 3mo ago
You’re on a social media site filled mostly with AI bots right now. Try saying something negative about China in any thread
- croes 3mo ago
  China is bad and Xi looks like Winnie the Pooh
- inigyou 3mo ago
  If you pick Israel instead, it gets flagged much faster.

IncreasePosts 3mo ago

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.

Razengan 3mo ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45580981

spiresofagartha 3mo ago
That goes beside the point. Scammers probably boosted more their scams with AI than developers boosted their deliveries.
- Razengan 3mo ago
  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.
  - Terr_ 3mo ago
    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.
    - chrisjj 3mo ago
      > deterrent "If you scam us, we'll scam, you back" ? I too am unconvinced.
j16sdiz 3mo ago
> Why not use AI to detect and avoid scams? Why would the scammer go thru your detector?

nicechianti 3mo ago

[dead]

cindyllm 3mo ago

[dead]

cheriot 3mo ago

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?

userbinator 3mo ago
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."
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 3mo ago
  That is completely impractical for most people.
  - tty456 3mo ago
    Why?
  - BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
    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.
    - infamouscow 3mo ago
      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.
      - userbinator 3mo ago
        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."

aussieguy1234 3mo ago

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.

karim79 3mo ago
I simply don't answer calls from unknown numbers. I feel like it's my right as a grown-up.
- abrowne 3mo ago
  Agreed. If they really want to get ahold of me they'll leave a voicemail. But I feel like I have to answer when my son is at school/camp.
  - grg0 3mo ago
    The scams do leave voicemails now, and they use voice genAI per the parent comment. If someone really wants to get a hold of you, they can knock on your door.
    - Jach 3mo ago
      Like I ever answer my door lol. But they can leave something in the mailbox, and I'll at least see the envelope in 1-30 days. Last week I finally had an onslaught of spam voicemails, several in an hour, that caused me to disable voicemail notifications altogether. I'll just check them when I'm expecting something now, similar to mail. My phone app was successfully filtering the calls so I wouldn't see them, but it still got routed to voicemail which then created a notification.
      - karim79 3mo ago
        Disable! Voicemails are nothing. If something is important it's delivered via text/app or email. Voice stuff is just narcissists trying to get their way.

Cider9986 3mo ago

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.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

madradavid 3mo ago

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.

gambiting 3mo ago
>>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?
- jsunderland323 3mo ago
  Yup, this is usually the case in pig butchering operations iirc.
  - UnreachableCode 3mo ago
    What, if I assume we're employing nicknames here, is a pig butchering operation?
    - aswegs8 3mo ago
      Some kind of romance scam. Look it up.
      - shevy-java 3mo ago

energy123 3mo ago

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/2081524600450482452 https://xcancel.com/SemioticRivalry/status/20815246004504824...

tantalor 3mo ago
How would you validate that? An opinion survey? Of whom?

bsian 3mo ago

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.

iammrpayments 3mo ago
I wish they implemented this for a week so you could experience first hand the consequences of your ignorance when everything stopped working.
- bsian 3mo ago
  If it’s a legitimate commercial relation (like a mining operation) they won’t have any issues paying the price or setting up alternate communication channels.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- Dylan16807 3mo ago
  Their idea is bad but this rebuttal makes even less sense.
fercircularbuf 3mo ago
Can you elaborate? In the spirit of the rules of HN I'm trying to assume good faith and trying to conjure the strongest plausible interpretation of what you wrote, but I'm drawing a blank.
snowwrestler 3mo ago
You can’t make it expensive enough to stop scammers, while not too expensive to impede legitimate calls like businesses, family overseas, or tourists calling home. There is a very high volume of legitimate calls from Africa, and scammers actually have tons of capital to work with. And this does not even get into the technical difficulty of defining and detecting a “call” “from” Africa. Voice can be tunneled to U.S. infrastructure and then passed to telephony carriers as a “domestic call.”

Zoadian 3mo ago

just finally start treating them as terrorists and airstrike them.

Hackbraten 3mo ago
Aside from the fact that this would be a despicable crime, how would you even go about identifying where a given scammer operation has its office buildings?
MichaelGlass 3mo ago
this sounds like a reasonable thing to do to a human being working in a call center /s
somelamer567 3mo ago
We need to get over the idea that criminals and geopolitical aggressors have human rights. Human rights should only be afforded to the law-abiding.

pixlmint 3mo ago

remember, this is the worst AI is going to be...

shevy-java 3mo ago

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?

crnkofe 3mo ago

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.

VortexLain 3mo ago

The Internet fuels 100% of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge.

smcg 3mo ago

AI companies should be held liable for this.