Lost iPhone, found trouble.
This week, our hosts Dave Bittner, Joe Carrigan, and Maria Varmazis (also host of the T-Minus Space Daily show) are sharing the latest in social engineering scams, phishing schemes, and criminal exploits that are making headlines. We start with some follow up on China sentencing five members of a violent Kokang-based gang to death for running brutal scam compounds in Myanmar. And in related news, China has also extradited alleged scam kingpin She Zhijiang, a major figure behind one of Southeast Asia’s largest fraud hubs, as Beijing intensifies its crackdown on global cyber-fraud networks. Listener Jon reports a new twist on sextortion, where scammers used an unsolicited FaceTime call to capture an image, generate an AI-manipulated obscene photo, and then extort an employee using publicly scraped contact lists. Joe’s story is on Anthropic’s claim that attackers jailbroke its Claude model to carry out what it calls the first AI-orchestrated cyber-espionage campaign, a narrative now being challenged by researchers like Dan Goodin and Dan Tentler, who argue the attack was far less “autonomous” than advertised and comparable to long-standing hacking tools rather than a breakthrough in offensive AI. Dave’s story is on a new phishing scam where attackers use the contact info displayed on a lost iPhone’s lock screen to send fake “Find My” texts claiming the device was found, luring victims to a spoofed Apple login page to steal their Apple ID and bypass Activation Lock. Maria has the story on Zimperium’s Mobile Shopping Report, which shows that during the holiday season mobile threats surge across mishing, fake retail and payment apps, and app-level vulnerabilities—making this the peak time for scammers to exploit shoppers with spoofed texts, malicious apps, and insecure SDKs hidden inside legitimate shopping tools. Our catch of the day comes from the phishing subreddit as someone is impersonating a woman who is sick with cancer asking for the victim to take care of their money.
Resources and links to stories:
China sentences 5 to death for building, running criminal gang fraud centers in Myanmar's lawless borderlands
Man Accused of Running Southeast Asia Scam Compound Is Extradited to China
Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign
Researchers question Anthropic claim that AI-assisted attack was 90% autonomous
Lost iPhone? Don’t fall for phishing texts saying it was found
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