The Stranger In Your Pocket: Pig-Butchering & Other AI Scams

Last week I spent two hours at the bank with an elderly relative who had gotten scammed out of thousands of dollars and other personal information. And yes this has been happening since snake-oil salesmen rolled in, conned us, and then moseyed on out of town with our money... but now it's on steroids. 

The Economist held a contest to redesign a cover (my entry above); original story is about Pig-Butchering 🐷 🗡 

Pig-butchering, or sha zhu pan, is Chinese criminal slang. First the scammers build a sty, with fake social-media profiles. Then they pick the pig, by identifying a target; raise the pig, by spending weeks or months building trust; cut the pig, by tempting them to invest; and butcher the pig by squeezing “every last drop of juice” from them, their family and friends.

Online scamming compares in size and scope to the illegal drug industry. (est: 1.5M criminals)

The difference is you don't have to be doing drugs or any illegal activities to encounter this phenomenon. Just living your life and they come to you. 

Scammers target all human frailties: fear, loneliness, greed, grief and boredom. 

There are romance scams, crypto and investment scams, identity scams, and who knows what else is coming. The point is we are not handling this on a global scale and it will eventually touch us or someone we care about. And AI will simply make them more efficient, realistic and harder to trace. 

This is a security and defense threat! It's not only money and humiliation in the mix but the opportunity for blackmailing and ransom leverage. It should be a top priority while we have control to some degree. What will happen when all our data is accesible in the cloud and the scammers don't need people pulling off these scams but AI can do it on its own?! 🤖

Banks, crypto exchanges, internet-service providers, telecoms companies, social-media platforms and e-commerce firms as well as schools, community organizers and government entities need to sound the alarms and work together to educate the public, protect the money and safety of those who get insnared and use this as a diplomatic minimum for good foreign relations. Cut off access to our citizens if they do not enforce laws against these types of criminal activity. 

Yes, suckers are born every day but never have we had to protect ourselves and every aspect of our lives from this kind of sophisticated technology and threats. Good Capitalism means protecting your clients, workers and industry from fraud- we need to pull together before none of us have any roast beef left and we're all wee, wee, weeing wondering if we still have a home.     

Original

The original cover and the winners: 

[Note: This is part of a project of mine: AI COVERS. This is not an actual Economist cover, nor is it endorsed in any way by their publisher/owners.]