Hello Fraud Fighters,

I’m at Fraud Fight Club in Charlotte this week, and the conference is buzzing. It’s unlike any other conference I've attended. All the familiar names and faces in fraud are here, including many I am meeting for the first time!

Let’s get the top stories this week.

This Week’s Top Fraud Highlights

• Point Of No Return China is flooding the market with open source AI models after the Deepseek success. Many lack guardrails to protect against use by scammers. The problem is that we can never go back now. Read More

• Call The Locksmith - An ultimate conwoman in China changed the locks on over 80 apartments and then sold the apartments to people for over $3.3 Million. Read More

• Old People ATM Limits - Japanese authorities are making banks lower ATM daily limits on any customer over 75 years old by 80%. This is their remedy to elder fraud scams, which are skyrocketing there. Read More

• Stroke Of The Pen - With a stroke of the pen, Trump signed an executive order to eliminate paper treasury checks to protect America’s banks, and it's estimated that it will save 750 million dollars. Will banks follow his lead and start to get rid of paper checks too? Read More

• Bad AI - The $200 billion in PPP fraud was partly caused by a lousy machine learning model that the SBA used to flag suspicious PPP loans. The AI was missing all the fraud and scams. Read More

• Pablo Escobar II - A Swedish man known as “El Silencio” bought the rights to use “Pablo Escobar” and opened Escobar Inc., where he sold flamethrowers and gold cell phones online. But it was one big massive fraud. Read More

• LOL Fraudster - Fyre Fest II continues to be a hoot. MacFarland again changes the location, doesn’t announce the artist, and warns that no one will get refunds if the event is cancelled. Read More

AI Fraud Company Says Their Tech Will Eliminate Fraud Analysts Forever

Every so often, a new fraud company comes around promising to obliterate the need for fraud analysts, and boy, is this one a doozy! They even claim that most other competing fraud solutions will be obsolete in the next 18 months.

The company Fraudinator (check out their website here) says that its AI is so good that companies can eliminate the fraud analyst and completely automate every customer interaction with its new alerting system.

This might be one of the most arrogant companies I have seen out there in a long time.

Click To Read

Flash SMS Pop-ups Emerge As New Bank Impersonation Scam

Scammers are using a new technique to alarm bank customers to phone fake bank fraud centers.

They’re using new “emergency messages” that take over a user's phone and then disappear after they have been dismissed. The technique is emerging in Australia, the Philippines, and the UK, where bank customers report these strange new alerts.

Read More

Friendly Fraud Showdown In Mexico: Couple Arrested After Successful Chargebacks With Amex

Christy and Paul Akeo were on their way to Cancun when they were arrested and thrown in Mexican prison close to a month ago. Their crime? Disputing and winning chargebacks on their Amex card.

Palace hotels sold the couple a timeshare for $6,300 a month in 2021 which the couple used extensively - 1,561 bookings by selling their allocated stays on Facebook. Palace Hotels started cancelling their reservations and so the couple started disputing the charges on Amex.

Is this first party fraud, or another shady Timeshare in Mexico sticking it tourist?

Read More

Scam Bosses Can Rent ChatGPT For Their Dog Pushers And Killers

In Pig Butchering lingo, dog pushers are the lower-level scammers that send the phishing messages over SMS and social media, hooking victims and gradually pushing them into investing in cryptocurrency.

Once a dog pusher is successful, the victim is passed off to a “Killer” who is experienced in getting every last penny they can.

Engaging ads are popping up on Pig Butchering Telegram channels, offering ChatGPT logins to scam bosses to help their pushers and killers interact with victims. These scammers are now using generative AI widely, from creating better text to using it in bots.

Same.Dev AI Gives Scammers The Ability To Clone Any Website In Minutes

The site is called Same.Dev, and with a simple prompt it will analyze any sight on the internet and create an exact clone of the site including any additional pages, modifications or tweaks that the user wants. It’s shockingly powerful, and created cloned websites for me in less than 5 minutes each.

After the cloned site is created it is launched to a development server so the user can interact with the final site. From there, it can be downloaded and deployed to any URL the person wants.

This powerful AI is being circulated on Telegram channel by scammers who love the ability to create near perfect spoof sites of banks, large companies, merchants, car dealerships or any other business they want to impersonate. This takes scamming to a whole new level!

Guilty! Charlie Javice Convicted In Riveting Trial

If you didn’t follow the $175 Million Chase Fraud Trial, don’t worry; you can probably catch it on a Netflix series in the coming months. It was riveting.

What has blown me is how audaciously she created those 4 million fake accounts, hid them from Chase, and then felt she had done nothing wrong.

She was convicted this week. Because her fraud was so blatant, the jury didn’t need much time to deliberate - the verdict was returned within a day.

Click This To Read More

Visa Let A Reporter Into The Heart Of Their Ultra Secure CyberFusion Center

In a high tech security complex protected by fingerprint scanning and drainage pond moats, Visa’s CyberFusion Center in Ashburn Virgina could be called mission control on the war on fraud and scams ,and it was featured in Forbes this week.

In the center, Fraud and security analyst monitor suspicious activities on large display screens, watching for threats against 14,500 financial institutions across 200 countries.

Visa says they have spent over 11 billion on fraud tech and they make about $1.5 billion in revenue from those fraud solutions!

Read More

Depressing New Study: Chip Card Didn’t Reduce Fraud On Debit Cards

A new (somewhat depressing) Fed study finds that chip cards didn’t reduce fraud in the US, and losses are up since they were deployed.

Despite chip card adoption reaching nearly 90% by 2022, counterfeit fraud rates for non-prepaid debit cards processed on Visa and Mastercard have not gone as expected. They have returned to the levels experienced before Chip Cards were introduced—about 9.1 basis points.

To make it worse, the study finds that while issuers might have benefited, all the fraud transferred to merchants who now bear the brunt. 😭 

Read More

Scam Boss Buys $120,000 License Plate To Show He Is Rich

In Cambodia, where the average wage is less than $6,000 yearly, a vanity license plate containing just three numbers, which signify great wealth, was presumably sold to a Chinese Scam boss for USD 120,000.

It’s maddening to think that some poor victim had their life savings drained for some scam boss to put this on their Rolls Royce while cruising the streets of Cambodia.

Click To Read

Discords Growing Fraud Scene Revealed

Since the Telegram crackdown, many fraud channels and groups have migrated to Discord.

This Youtuber investigates the growing Discord fraud scene, in particular, breaking down how Uber Eats is getting targeted by small food orders that won’t raise red flags.

Click To Watch

Thanks for reading the whole newsletter.

And Happy April 1st! Hope you have a great day and don’t get fooled by any outlandish pranks today! 🤣 

Happy fraud hunting. I hope to see you at the Fraud Fight Club this week.

FrankonFraud