It’s High Time Scammers Upped Their Game

The exponential rise of artificial intelligence is such that even the middle-aged, techno illiterati, such as myself, are now aware of it. The human race appears to be living in something of an AI dawn, with opinion divided on whether the future will lead us inexorably to a Terminator like dystopia, or the promised land wherein robots cater to our every whim. Experts appear to fall broadly into two camps: on the one hand, visionaries like Prof Jürgen Schmidhuber, often referred to as the ‘father of AI’, argue that you ‘cannot stop’ the rise of AI. And while he concedes that we are now effectively in a technological arms race, he remains ‘much more worried about the old dangers of nuclear bombs than about the new little dangers of AI that we see now’. On the other side of the aisle, he is possibly outranked by ‘godfather of AI’, Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who fears the exploitation of AI by ‘bad actors’. Knowing almost nothing about the subject, I’d wager the majority of experts are worried, judging by the more than a thousand who recently signed a letter calling for a moratorium.

Nonetheless, whoever’s got it right you cannot argue about the results. AI is now able to read, understand, and summarise text, as well as write almost anything, and grade it by itself. It can create visual art upon instruction. It it capable of making financial investments, and does so quite well judging by the 52% of US financial firms that use it. It can generate computer code, beat chess world champions with consummate ease, predict the weather (correctly for a change), and recommends products to consumers with a high degree of accuracy.

‘Why am I even bothering to write this’ you may well ask, ‘Seeing as the computer could no doubt do a better job?’ That’s almost certainly true, apart from two points: A) the computer is undoubtedly not as much of a miserable bastard as I am, and B) I have no idea how to use the damn things.

That being the case, I’d like to draw your attention to the world of scamming. Not that I have any particular knowledge or interest in that world, but if like me you use social media to any degree, you probably come into contact with these things from time to time. Personally, I manage to navigate the waters reasonably well as I rarely interact with people I do not know, and have almost no interest in the scams they promote. For example, I don’t trade currency, am not interested in ‘working from home part-time’, and am a few decades past the time when a buxom blonde could conceivably be interested in me. Besides which, I’d assumed the whole market was essentially automated these days - but perhaps I was wrong.

Happening to open the ‘message requests’ section on Twitter this morning, I could not believe the lamentable standards of swindling that seem to infest the once reputable criminal world. Here is just a brief sample of the flotsam and jetsam filling up my inbox:

First up, there’s my stockbroker:

The stock you suggested the other day was pretty good, gain me bucks. I lost your WhatsApp ID and don't know why. Can you add me back?

Then, there’s Jenny:

Hi, nice to meet you. My name is Jenny and I want to share my life in America with you. I like mature American gentlemen. I don't use Twitter often, add me on WhatsApp

Some drug dealer pushing Bitcoin:

My friend recently recommended me an insider channel. They publish signals for pumping coins, on which you can earn from 100% to 340% profit per Pump. I managed to earn 6.49 BTC out of 0.62 BTC. I recommend everyone to subscribe this channel

Not forgetting the dearest one:

Hello dearest, Good evening and how are you doing? am just new here and  looking for a good and honest friend who has a good sense of humor, i want to be your friend because, friendship is sweet when its new, its  sweeter when is true but sweetest when is you, sorry if i offended you

Best in show however, was this scam account which seems to randomly forget which scam it’s running, and changes its ID each time:

I am increasing sales for a merchant on Amazon. It only takes an hour or so a day to make 20-200 pounds, God will be kind to those who know how to seize the opportunity, if you want to make easy money too please send me a private message…

…Today I am sick for a long time, the price of things is high.  I have no money, I am struggling to run my family, if anyone can help me financially.  Rich people please…

…Help!

With the cost of living crisis, and AI pushing back the frontiers of human intelligence, surely we can get some government department to oversee the quality control on these things? While I’ve no principle objection to getting conned (the government’s done it to me since birth), one can’t help feeling scammers’ hearts aren’t really in the game. Perhaps one of our less salubrious universities could start to offer degrees in cyber crime - the levels of illiteracy and unconvincing subterfuge are really unacceptable in this day and age.

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