Interesting article on the variety of LinkedIn job scams around the world: > In India, tech jobs are used as bait because the industry employs millions of > people and offers high-paying roles. In Kenya, the recruitment industry is > largely unorganized, so scamsters leverage fake personal referrals. In Mexico, > bad actors capitalize on the informal nature of the job economy by advertising > fake formal roles that carry a promise of security. In Nigeria, scamsters > often manage to get LinkedIn users to share their login credentials with the > lure of paid work, preying on their desperation amid an especially acute > unemployment crisis...

Over the past few decades, it’s become easier and easier to create fake receipts. Decades ago, it required special paper and printers—I remember a company in the UK advertising its services to people trying to cover up their affairs. Then, receipts became computerized, and faking them required some artistic skills to make the page look realistic. Now, AI can do it all: > Several receipts shown to the FT by expense management platforms demonstrated > the realistic nature of the images, which included wrinkles in paper, detailed > itemization that matched real-life menus, and signatures...

Good Wall Street Journal article on criminal gangs that scam people out of their credit card information: > Your highway toll payment is now past due, one text warns. You have U.S. > Postal Service fees to pay, another threatens. You owe the New York City > Department of Finance for unpaid traffic violations. > > The texts are ploys to get unsuspecting victims to fork over their credit-card > details. The gangs behind the scams take advantage of this information to buy > iPhones, gift cards, clothing and cosmetics. > > Criminal organizations operating out of China, which investigators blame for > the toll and postage messages, have used them to make more than $1 billion > over the last three years, according to the Department of Homeland Security...

The variations seem to be endless. Here’s a fake ghostwriting scam that seems to be making boatloads of money. > This is a big story about scams being run from Texas and Pakistan estimated to > run into tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, viciously defrauding > Americans with false hopes of publishing bestseller books (a scam you’d not > think many people would fall for but is surprisingly huge). In January, three > people were charged with defrauding elderly authors across the United States > of almost $44 million ­by “convincing the victims that publishers and > filmmakers wanted to turn their books into blockbusters.”...

Reporting on the rise of fake students enrolling in community college courses: > The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling > in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements > to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And > because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost > exclusively impacted by the fraud. The article talks about the rise of this type of fraud, the difficulty of detecting it, and how it upends quite a bit of the class structure and learning community...

It’s becoming an organized crime tactic: > Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store display, open > them in a separate location, and either record the card numbers and PINs or > replace them with a new barcode. The crooks then repair the packaging, return > to a store and place the cards back on a rack. When a customer unwittingly > selects and loads money onto a tampered card, the criminal is able to access > the card online and steal the balance. > > […] > > In card draining, the runners assist with removing, tampering and restocking > of gift cards, according to court documents and investigators...