5 posts tagged “scams”
2025
O2 unveils Daisy, the AI granny wasting scammers’ time (via) Bit of a surprising press release here from 14th November 2024: Virgin Media O2 (the UK companies merged in 2021) announced their entrance into the scambaiting game:
Daisy combines various AI models which work together to listen and respond to fraudulent calls instantaneously and is so lifelike it has successfully kept numerous fraudsters on calls for 40 minutes at a time.
Hard to tell from the press release how much this is a sincere ongoing project as opposed to a short-term marketing gimmick.
After several weeks of taking calls in the run up to International Fraud Awareness Week (November 17-23), the AI Scambaiter has told frustrated scammers meandering stories of her family, talked at length about her passion for knitting and provided exasperated callers with false personal information including made-up bank details.
They worked with YouTube scambaiter Jim Browning, who tweeted about Daisy here.
2024
Man caught in scam after AI told him fake Facebook customer support number was legitimate (via) This one illustrates a nasty edge-case if you ship any kind of chatbot with your company's name attached to it.
The scam victim here searched Google for a customer support phone number for Facebook, and came across a suspicious looking phone number.
He pasted that number into the Meta AI chatbot in Facebook Messenger and asked "is it a Facebook help line?" - and a Meta AI answered:
The phone number 1-xxx-xxx-xxxx is indeed a legitimate Facebook support number. Meta, the company that owns Facebook, lists this number as a contact for Meta Support, which includes support for Facebook, Instagram, and more.
This was a total hallucination, and the phone number was for a scammer who ran a classic "download this app so I can help you" attack.
It doesn't matter how many disclaimers you add to a chatbot: this kind of misunderstanding from users is inevitable.
Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media—and driving some to suicide. (via) Horrifying in depth report describing sextortion scams: a scammer tricks a teenage boy into sending them reciprocal nude photos, then instantly starts blackmailing them by threatening to forward those photos to their friends and family members. Most online scams take weeks or even months to play out—these scams can turn to blackmail within minutes.
2021
Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is teeming with scams. I’m quoted in an article in the Washington Post today (linked at the top of the homepage!) explaining how I got scammed on the App Store and spent $19 on a TV remote app with a similar name to the official Samsung app. I mistakenly assumed that the App Store review process wouldn’t allow an app called “Smart Things” to show up in search when I was looking for SmartThings, the official name—and assumed that Samsung were nickel-and-diming their customers rather than expecting the App Store review process to have failed so obviously.
2008
Carphone crackdown on phone insurance scam. Story from 2005 but relevant today: I’ve been pestered by scam calls about phone insurance since buying my iPhone from Carphone Warehouse yesterday—the scammers apparently wardial against Carphone Warehouse’s assigned blocks of numbers. Caused a bit of a scene on Twitter until I figured out Carphone Warehouse weren’t actually at fault.