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...

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...

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.”...

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...

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.

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In card draining, the runners assist with removing, tampering and restocking of gift cards, according to court documents and investigators...

In any case, it was never clear what those ideas were. IronNet never seemed to have any special technology going for it. Near as I could tell, its success was entirely based on Alexander’s name...

On Friday, four days after Georgia Democrats began warning that bad actors could abuse the state’s new online portal for canceling voter registrations, the Secretary of State’s Office acknowledged to ProPublica that it had identified multiple such attempts…

…the portal suffered at least two security glitches that briefly exposed voters’ dates of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and their full driver’s license numbers—the exact information needed to cancel others’ voter registrations...

Citations of scientific work abide by a standardized referencing system: Each reference explicitly mentions at least the title, authors’ names, publication year, journal or conference name, and page numbers of the cited publication. These details are stored as metadata, not visible in the article’s text directly, but assigned to a digital object identifier, or DOI—a unique identifier for each scientific publication.

References in a scientific publication allow authors to justify methodological choices or present the results of past studies, highlighting the iterative and collaborative nature of science...

Online marketplaces sell tiny pink cowboy hats. They also sell miniature pencil sharpeners, palm-size kitchen utensils, scaled-down books and camping chairs so small they evoke the Stonehenge scene in “This Is Spinal Tap.” Many of the minuscule objects aren’t clearly advertised.

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But there is no doubt some online sellers deliberately trick customers into buying smaller and often cheaper-to-produce items, Witcher said. Common tactics include displaying products against a white background rather than in room sets or on models, or photographing items with a perspective that makes them appear bigger than they really are. Dimensions can be hidden deep in the product description, or not included at all...

Napoleon Gonzalez, of Etna, assumed the identity of his brother in 1965, a quarter century after his sibling’s death as an infant, and used the stolen identity to obtain Social Security benefits under both identities, multiple passports and state identification cards, law enforcement officials said.

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A new investigation was launched in 2020 after facial identification software indicated Gonzalez’s face was on two state identification cards.

The facial recognition technology is used by the Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles to ensure no one obtains multiple credentials or credentials under someone else’s name, said Emily Cook, spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office...

Phones, of course, can be made inaccessible with the use of passwords and face or fingerprint unlocking. And bank cards can be stopped.

But the thief has a method which circumnavigates those basic safety protocols.

Once they have the phone and the card, they register the card on the relevant bank’s app on their own phone or computer. Since it is the first time that card will have been used on the new device, a one-off security passcode is demanded...