ScamAgents: How AI Agents Can Simulate Human-Level Scam Calls

Large Language Models LLMs have demonstrated impressive fluency and reasoning capabilities, but their potential for misuse has raised growing concern. In this paper, we present ScamAgent, an autonomous multi-turn agent built on top of LLMs, capable of generating highly realistic scam call scripts...

DOJ Slams XCast with $10 Million Fine Over Massive Illegal Robocall Operation

The U.S. Department of Justice DoJ on Tuesday said it reached a settlement with VoIP service provider XCast over allegations that it facilitated illegal telemarketing campaigns since at least January 2018, in contravention of the Telemarketing Sales Rule TSR. In addition to prohibiting the compan...

RedZei Chinese Scammers Targeting Chinese Students in the U.K.

Chinese international students in the U.K. have been targeted by persistent Chinese-speaking scammers for over a year as part of an activity dubbed RedZei aka RedThief. "The RedZei fraudsters have chosen their targets carefully, researched them and realized it was a rich victim group that is ripe...

Robocalls More Than Doubled in 2021, Cost Victims $30B

No surprise to anyone with a phone: Robocalls are rampant. In fact, the number of scam calls more than doubled over the past year, successfully bilking wireless phone customers out of $29.8 billion in 2021 alone. Wireless carrier T-Mobile just released its Scam and Robocall year-end report, and t...

Yandex Employee Caught Selling Access to Users' Email Inboxes

Russian Dutch-domiciled search engine, ride-hailing and email service provider Yandex on Friday disclosed a data breach that compromised 4,887 email accounts of its users. The company blamed the incident on an unnamed employee who had been providing unauthorized access to the users' mailboxes for...

News Wrap: Voice Assistant Laser Hack, Twitter Insider Threats, Data Breach Fine Fails

Threatpost editors break down the top news stories for the week ended Nov. 8. The hot stories of the week include: Despite trillions of dollars in data-breach fine payouts, each year the number of compromised companies and individuals with private data exposed rise – a Threatpost feature looks at...

Rogue TrendMicro Employee Sold Customer Data to Tech Support Scammers

Do you always uncomfortable trusting companies with your data? If so, you're not alone. While companies do much to protect themselves from external threats, insiders always pose the highest risk to a company's data. Unfortunately, when we say companies can't eliminate insider threat completely,...

Rogue Trend Micro Employee Sold Customer Data for 68K Accounts

Trend Micro said that a rogue employee sold the data of 68,000 customers to a malicious third party, who then used that data to target customers with scam calls. The employee, who gained unauthorized access to a customer-support database, has since been terminated. Trend Micro said that the...

Trend Micro Discloses Insider Threat Impacting Some of its Consumer Customers

We recently became aware of a security incident that resulted in the unauthorized disclosure of some personal data of an isolated number of customers of our consumer product. We immediately started investigating the situation and found that this was the result of a malicious insider threat. The...

On the Trail of the Robocall King

An investigator set out to discover the source of one scammy robocall. Turns out, his target made them by the millions...

TalkTalk Admits Customer Data Breach, warns of Scam Calls

TalkTalk, one of the biggest UK-based phone, TV and Internet service provider with 4 million customers, has admitted it suffered a major Data Breach. TalkTalk said customer information was accessed after a breach at a third-party company, in which names, addresses, phone numbers and TalkTalk...