Paedophiles, scammers, hackers and criminals of all kinds are increasingly exploiting artificial intelligence (AI) to target victims in new and harmful ways, a senior police chief has warned. Alex Murray, the national police lead for AI, said that the use of the technology was growing rapidly because of its increasing accessibility and that police had to "move fast" to keep on top of the threat. "We know through the history of policing that criminals are inventive and will use anything they can to commit crime. They're certainly using AI to commit crime now," he said. "It can happen on an international and serious organised crime scale, and it can happen in someone's bedroom … You can think of any crime type and put it through an AI lens and say: 'What is the opportunity here?'"

Abuse reporting services collect reports about abuse victims have suffered. Accurate classification of the submitted reports is fundamental to analyzing the prevalence and financial impact of different abuse types (e.g., sextortion, investment, romance). Current classification approaches are problematic because they require the reporter to select the abuse type from a list, assuming the reporter has the necessary experience for the classification, which we show is frequently not the case, or require manual classification by analysts, which does not scale. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel approach to classify cryptocurrency abuse reports automatically. We first build a taxonomy of 19 frequently reported abuse types. Given as input the textual description written by the reporter, our classifier leverages a large language model (LLM) to interpret the text and assign it an abuse type in our taxonomy. We collect 290K cryptocurrency abuse reports from two popular reporting services: BitcoinAbuse and BBB's ScamTracker. We build ground truth datasets for 20K of those reports and use them to evaluate three designs for our LLM-based classifier and four LLMs, as well as a supervised ML classifier used as a baseline. Our LLM-based classifier achieves a precision of 0.92, a recall of 0.87, and an F1 score of 0.89, compared to an F1 score of 0.55 for the baseline. We demonstrate our classifier in two applications: providing financial loss statistics for fine-grained abuse types and generating tagged addresses for cryptocurrency analysis platforms.

The platform will use AI-powered systems to detect nude images and identify sextortion accounts.

The government is warning Americans about the rise in AI'sextortion' that is sweeping the nation - and the attack has caused at least a 20 suicides in recent years. Sextortion is when an offender convinces the victim to send sexually explicit pictures of videos and then threatens - and the criminal threatens to release them to the public if they do not receive more content or money. However, these attacks are being combined with AI, giving offenders tools to create attractive personas and generate convincing conversations. These attacks have risen 1,000 percent in the last 18 months, according to the Network Contagion Research Institute, driven by West African gangs who target young people on Instagram, Snapchat and Wizz. Adam Pilton who formerly led a cybercrime team, said: 'I have seen and investigated many cases of sextortion.

A TikToker warned of a growing trend involving child predators who use artificial intelligence to turn photos and videos of kids into explicit content. Posting imagery of children on social media can invite "digital kidnappers" to steal their likeness and use them in exploitative AI-generated videos, Alex Hoffman said in a viral TikTok video. "Digital kidnapping is when somebody steals the photos of your minor from the internet, usually a social media platform, and either pretends to be the child or pretends to be the child's parents," she said. "Oftentimes digital kidnappers will take normal photos of a child on the internet and alter them to look explicit or show the child doing something inappropriate." "Digital kidnappers can also take photos of a child and make them into an inappropriate video using AI materials," said Hoffman, a law student who has worked with the government investigating online sex crimes against children.

Yaron Litwin, executive of AI-powered company Canopy, explains how "AI can be used for good" in an ongoing chess match with criminals using deepfakes in sextortion scams. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255). A company's reliance on artificial intelligence to prevent sextortion scams sets up an AI vs. AI clash between criminals and "good guys." Sextortion cases increased 322% between February 2022 and February 2023, according to the FBI, which recently said there's been an additional significant uptick since April. Innocent beach pictures or men's bare-chested gym pictures can be twisted into sexually explicit, AI-generated "deepfakes" that are weaponized against panicked and embarrassed teens and preteens.

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