A New Surveillance Tool Invades Border Towns

This week, WIRED reported that a group of prolific scammers known as the Yahoo Boys are openly operating on major platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, and Telegram. Evading content moderation systems, the group organizes and engages in criminal activities that range from scams to sextortion schemes. On Wednesday, researchers published a paper detailing a new AI-based methodology to detect the "shape" of suspected money laundering activity on a blockchain. The researchers--composed of scientists from the cryptocurrency tracing firm Elliptic, MIT, and IBM--collected patterns of bitcoin transactions from known scammers to an exchange where dirty crypto could get turned into cash. They used this data to train an AI model to detect similar patterns.