By Catherine Powell
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| Cyber crime by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free |
As scary as the wild weather has been this summer, there's another storm brewing on the horizon that's even more terrifying: Fraud-as-a-Service. This kind of crime ran rampant during the pandemic. International cyber gangs made billions at taxpayer expense by submitting fraudulent unemployment applications using stolen identities. Just like drug cartels, these gangs would use local affiliates to cash in before paying them a percentage of the take. Even if caught, the local mule wouldn't be able to implicate those higher up on the food chain, since all their instructions were delivered electronically. The FBI determined that the hierarchy of the biggest cyber gangs originated in places they had no jurisdiction, like Russia, China, and Nigeria. What's worse is that these illegal enterprises proved so lucrative that the organized criminals running them decided to up the ante by using artificial intelligence to amp up both the scope and range of their shenanigans. If you don't want to get roped into these cyber frauds, there are a few things you need to know.
