Gotcha! ScamGPT w/ Lana Swartz & Alice Marwick

Computer Says Maybe

Thought we were at peak scam? Well, ScamGPT just entered the chat.

More like this: Gotcha! The Crypto Grift w/ Mark Hays

This is part three of Gotcha! — our series on scams, how they work, and how technology is supercharging them. This week Lana Swartz and Alice Marwick join Alix to discuss their primer on how generative AI is automating fraud.

We dig into the very human, very dark world of the scam industry, where the scammers are often being exploited in highly sophisticated human trafficking operations — and are now using generative AI to scale up and speed up.

We talk about how you probably aren’t going to get a deepfake call from a family member to demand a ransom, but the threats are still evolving in ways that are scary and until now largely unregulated. And as ever even though the problems are made worse by technology, we explore the limitations of technology and laws to stem the tide.

Further reading & resources:

• Read the primer here!
• More about Lana Swartz
• More about Alice Marwick
• New Money by Lana Swartz
• Scam: Inside Southeast Asia's Cybercrime Compounds by Mark Bo, Ivan Franceschini, and Ling Li
• Revealed: the huge growth of Myanmar scam centres that may hold 100,000 trafficked people
• Al Jazeera True Crime Report on scamming farms in South East Asia
• Scam Empire project by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project

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