I'm hesitating to read or listen to this for fear it oversimplifies. I worked for about a year @NYPDnews on this. We learned a LOT. Most of the $320 million I estimate was lost by New Yorkers on Cyber-enabled scams in 2019 began with voice calls to set the hook...

Looking through our empirical data, we see that scam calls dominate the world of Cyber-enabled (which doesn't include ransomware or network intrusion/takeover, but does include crime that leverages a digital channel for some aspect of the attack).
We found that NYPD officers, when empowered to combat this kind of crime with training and tools, were champing at the bit to get out there and fight it. They all know the scams are out there - many told us of family members who'd fallen victim - but they felt powerless to act...
I personally blame the Feds, who over the past two decades have worked hard to make all "Cybercrime" seem (a) mysterious and sophisticated to the extent that (b) only the Feds could combat it, through tools like the IC3 survey. That tool is actually quite ineffective.
As I said at RSA2020, for Cyber-enabled scams, IC3's survey is the place where good leads go to die. For example, in 2018 around zero point three three percent of cases reported to it were ultimately investigated by a task force. They're just snowed under. https://t.co/IxjM6t0cfm
And conventional wisdom - that victims of these call scams and other cyber-enabled crimes are older - collapses like a cheap accordion when we look at the demography of those who actually report. The race, gender, and age of these victims surprise many - they're digital natives.
We also found that many of the perps were local, regional, or national. That even when the calls are placed using foreign call centers, an entire apparatus exists in the US to manage the mules, aggregate and launder stolen funds, etc. Which makes sense.
Gangs get in on the action, finding that Cyber enabled crime is less risky and more lucrative than other schemes. I'm gratified that NYPD and many other agencies and groups are working very hard to bring some law to this essentially lawless, but fast-growing sector of crime.
So while I am encouraged to see reporting like the article I began this thread with, I'm concerned that reporters may miss the forest for the trees and move too quickly to point the finger at one group, or country, as "the" source of scam calls. A source, certainly. . .
NYPD is doing an amazing job of educating citizens. It's discouraging so many don't hear the warnings until they've been victimized. Or even afterwards, when told for example that they can't pay their bills at a BTC ATM, or no government will ask for gift cards they still do it.
In the end the solutions are: Police must take reports, gather data and evidence, and try to work these cases, of which many are VERY solvable without sophisticated forensics. Victims must be better educated. DAs too need education, so they'll take more of these cases.
What is most exquisitely frustrating to me is that this has been going on for some time with no change. I think people should be up in arms that the FBI can say utter tosh like, "We can't help you because you lost less than $100,000." https://t.co/uaMhrJXG5w
I think people should be up in arms that local police in turn tell people to call the same people who refuse to work cases. It is a huge shell game. This must change. /end

More from News

A quick thread on the new variant, pulling together information from news sources, twitter, genomic databases, and word from well-placed peers.


The new variant in the UK consists of several mutations in the spike protein, including ΔH69/ΔV70 deletions & other receptor binding domain mutations such as N501Y.

The variant is described here in this pre-print from @GuptaR_lab.

https://t.co/ui2U1r1ANA


The ΔH69/ΔV70 variant continues to increase quite rapidly as a proportion of overall positives (roughly doubling in the last 2 to three days), and is apparently now the dominant strain in test positives in some regions.

Extensive efforts have gone into enhanced surveillance for the ΔH69/ΔV70 deletion with and without RBD mutations, and it is good that we are aware of this.

There is a need for calm and rational thinking, and more evidence is needed.

But the early data is certainly concerning
This week marks 12 months since Josephine Cashman supplied Andrew Bolt with a letter falsely attributed to a Yolngu lawman that Bolt published via NewsCorp on Jan 26 as parcel of his persecution of Bruce Pascoe. Cashman & Bolt still haven’t provided a satisfactory explanation

Terry Yumbulul didn’t write the letter and didn’t agree with its content. He said so himself in a video published the next day
https://t.co/IJ6ricZeRi and in a written statement published later the same day


The weird thing was, it soon emerged that large sections of the letter had been cribbed from other sources. Weird because as a Yolngu lawman, Terry didn’t need to borrow his knowledge from unrelated, alternate sources ... pretty much verbatim

The fallout was swift. Bolt was compelled to do a correction on his column and Cashman was just as swiftly dumped from her position of the Morrison government’s Senior Advisory Group for an Indigenous Voice to Government

There was no apology from either of them or from NewsCorp tho, and with the assistance of Sky News After Dark they desperately attempted to obfuscate the reality that everybody involved had been caught out and left red faced
.@louiscasiano from @FoxNews reached out to ask if we are actually planning on contaminating the hotel rooms of Proud Boys with bedbugs. The short answer is no, we don't even know if that's possible. But here's our full response.


That post was clearly satire. We have no idea how one would actually go about the activity that was suggested.

What is not satire are the numerous death threats that were sent to us by Trump supporters in the lead up to the November election.

Here are a few tweets depicting detailed and credible death threats that you didn’t ask for comment on:
https://t.co/UiI12M0Aey.
https://t.co/PPe75XWImX
https://t.co/4Ia8659wK8
https://t.co/n5ov6R8Gyh


Each of those tweets includes the email address of the sender. We wish you luck in reaching out to them for comment.

Further, the hate crimes committed by the Proud Boys during their last visit to DC were not satire. A marauding band of drunk white nationalists stormed through our city, tearing down and burning religious symbols declaring respect for Black lives.

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