I think as agents become more pervasive, there will be an arms race of ecosystems to screen them out.
[0] https://siliconangle.com/2023/12/19/new-report-warns-rise-ai...
You want to send me an email? Please give me $1 first, and if I don't like your content I can, without notice, change that number to $50 per email.
I pay for email via Fastmail, don't really have a spam problem. I think this addresses your point above, that to have an effective spam filter takes money, and free email doesn't generate money.
I pay for search via Kagi, don't see all those crappy Google Ads and actually get useful search.
I can see the other services (socials, messaging) moving to a paid model to solve the same issues.
LLMs are interesting for phishing as they allow personalisation. Spam is no longer, well exactly the Monty Python meaning.
Because of my work I investigated a lot of spam, and I discovered real life identities of senders in many cases (because of horrible or no exostent opsec). Most of them were either underage, lived in third world countries, or both.
I saw someone fall for one recently where a scammer had created a fake announcement from an email sending company stating they were adding political messages to the bottom of your sent emails, and to log in to opt out. The look and feel of the email was pretty much perfect.
It's so frustrating just standing by and watching as we descend into a low-trust society.
"Click link" ? I think not. Gonna log in myself in a new window and try to navigate to the same thing on my own.
Yes, I'm looking at you Teal HQ, you're spamming us even 3 months after deleting our accounts.
(By the way, the perpetrators are closer to home than Nigeria).
Scammers started using LLMs to write fishing emails, then scammers started generating images, then they started using AI to vibe code it. Its just a natural progression.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47435156, we can know that India has a ~70% positive view on AI. While scammers likely didn't fill out the survey, it shows the general view on AI from where most scammers work from and live.
Got any citation on that? From what I've seen, the vaat majority of scams are targeted at other Indians. The government runs a significant number of cyber awareness programs nowadays; don't think they appreciate scammers.
I suspect it's the only reasonable advice now?
Even if it's not the only they can do.
If someone calls from an unknown number, they get some sort of captcha to prove that they are a human, or they matter is important.
For example, the message should say that, if you are geniune, then please call again after 1 minute..
In my country, despite voicemail being available since the introduction of mobile phones decades ago, I am yet to hear of a single instance of anybody actually leaving a message.
And at least in my country one should explicitly enable voicemail. I never could make it work for some reason..
And as far as I can see, it is not widely used.
EDIT: Oh, I completely missed the fact that there can be a fake voicemail where the phone automatically answers and asks the caller to speak and record it and store the audio on the phone itself. Then the user can check such recorded messages later..
Did you mean something like that? I am really surprised that this is not common already...
>Note: You can play back the audio data only to the standard output device. That is, the mobile device speaker or a Bluetooth headset. You cannot play sound files in the conversation audio during a call.
Damn google! You did this so that apps cannot do the above. You cater to spammers!
The tricky part for scammers is there is no good answer here, if you claim to be a plumber and the victim hasn't booked a plumber, they won't answer.
The response “Am I speaking to…” gets cut off with “Nope, you answer my questions first”. If they _must_ speak to Mr [MySurname] I claim to be my PA and that they aren't talking to him(me) without convincing me they aren't a junk call first. If I have a few minutes to spare, it can be quite an entertaining little game keeping them on the line so they can't be conning someone more vulnerable. Unfortunately must junk calls these days are either initially automated or the humans are wise to people like me being a waste of their time so they hang up cutting that fun short.
I too suffer from this, and one thing that has been increasingly annoying to deal with, even worse than spam imo, is the cold outreach campaigns from software vendors, recruiters, marketers, etc.
I get so many of them that I am now getting to a point of considering writing my own rules engine to filter the noise, it's infuriating.
I’d even say all vibe-coded slop is spam as soon as anybody else than the original perpetrator has to read it.
"AI" companies are responsible for this mess. They should be held accountable for digging us out of it.
Recently reported nearly 200 firebase accounts to google, haven't gotten any since
This changes, of course, with phishing. Will phishing by email even survive when voice imitation calls become more and more available? I guess it will, the bar for monetization is too low bar with resellable accounts and the like.
The amount of borderline harassment I get about my Google Drive being almost full is shocking.
They have really amped up the ferocity of the language they're using to try and extract money from you for Drive. No wonder spammers are copying that.
It hasn't moved since.
Thankfully they do have the means to change the wording of the emails I can't unsubscribe from. I don't know what the official reason is but the result is I have to modify my filters.
Apple are no better. Choose between a permanent nag notification on Settings, my most trusted app, or disabling backup of all the negligibly-sized data.
Are you sure it’s not the other way around?