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#fraud

Everything tagged fraud, across every stream.

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AIAI #AI-agents#fraud#scams#techcrunch-disrupt

Apate sends AI agents undercover to get scammed

A defensive use of AI agents: wasting scammers' time while collecting the bank accounts and wallets they use.

Australian startup Apate.ai, spun out of Macquarie University research, runs thousands of AI agents that pose as potential victims: they answer scam calls, reply to phishing messages and join scam groups, in many languages and voices. The company says its agents have wasted 17 years of scammers' time across 2.5 million conversations, and that the goal is to extract bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers and impersonated brands, which it sells to banks, telcos, governments and utilities. Apate was a Startup Battlefield finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt; the article cites FBI figures of more than 22,000 AI-related crime complaints in 2025 with about $893 million in losses.

Cascadic Analysis 2
UndertowRole underspecification / the Doorman Problem

What hidden risk could pull against this, even if the news is good?

Apate's agents pretend to be victims and follow phishing links on purpose. An agent built to look gullible has to know exactly where to stop: which links to open, what to type, and what never to hand over, even while acting the part.

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UndertowAutonomous cyber capability scales attackers enormously

What hidden risk could pull against this, even if the news is good?

The article cites more than $632 million in 2025 US losses to investment scams where the FBI says fraudsters use AI to run conversations. Apate's thousands of agents show how cheaply conversation can be scaled; the scammers have the same tools.

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Rabbit Holes 1
Generated by AI.
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PSPolitical Spectrum #ACA#fraud#healthcare#subsidies#Trump

Trump administration says it will remove 760,000 people from ACA coverage over fraud concerns

Everyone says fraud should be stopped; the political fight is over whether the government's process will remove mostly fake enrollments or real people who still qualify.

What happened

The administration announced plans to remove about 760,000 people from Affordable Care Act marketplace enrollment, saying the records reflect fraud, duplicate enrollment or people who do not exist. Officials estimate the move would cancel roughly $2.2 billion in subsidies.

Republican / administration case

The administration says taxpayers should not fund fraudulent or invalid enrollment and presents the action as part of a broader effort to reduce waste in federal health programs.

Democratic / critic case

Democrats support combating fraud but warn that aggressive purges can wrongly terminate legitimate coverage, particularly when people face documentation problems or errors they did not cause.

Libertarian perspective

There was no major recent Libertarian Party statement on this specific purge that I found. The libertarian policy split would usually distinguish between support for rooting out fraudulent spending and broader skepticism about government-managed insurance subsidies in the first place.

Where the disagreement really is

There is little dispute that fake enrollment should be removed. The contested question is whether the verification process is accurate enough to avoid taking coverage from eligible people.

From each bank

Reporting

Associated Press ↗
Generated by AI.
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CCybersecurity #agentic-commerce#AI-agents#fraud#payments#privacy

Banks warn that AI shopping agents could expand fraud and data-privacy risks

Agentic commerce connects AI systems directly to credentials, payment rails and purchases, turning model mistakes or manipulation into financial events.

Major banks warned that the rapid rollout of AI shopping agents is creating fraud, scam and privacy risks faster than consumer safeguards are developing.

Concerns include how agents handle financial data, whether they can be manipulated toward insecure payment methods and who is responsible when an automated transaction goes wrong.

Why it matters

Once agents can spend money, security failures become materially different from a bad chatbot answer. Identity, authorization, transaction confirmation and dispute resolution become core parts of the agent security model.

Cascadic Analysis 4
UndertowConfused-deputy / excessive-agency problem

What hidden risk could pull against this, even if the news is good?

A shopping agent with identity and payment authority is a textbook powerful deputy. The attacker may not need the card number if they can persuade the agent to use the user's legitimate purchasing privileges.

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UndertowPrompt injection may be fundamentally impossible to eliminate

What hidden risk could pull against this, even if the news is good?

Merchant pages, reviews, emails and support messages are all untrusted language that the agent may read while making decisions. That makes prompt injection a financial-security problem rather than just a chatbot annoyance.

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UndertowPersistent memory creates a new poisoning surface

What hidden risk could pull against this, even if the news is good?

Persistent preferences can become a durable attack surface: poison a remembered merchant, shipping address or approval rule today and the consequence may appear in a future transaction.

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UndertowDelayed Consequence / False Success Problem

What hidden risk could pull against this, even if the news is good?

Fraud can initially masquerade as personalization or convenience. As users learn to approve routine agent actions, the system can gain trust faster than rare abuse becomes visible.

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Rabbit Holes 1
  • Announcing Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)

    One industry attempt at the problem the banks describe: a protocol for proving an AI agent is actually authorized to pay on your behalf.

    Google Cloud Blog · Swim · 30 min

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