AI scam calls imitating familiar voices are a growing problem
Scam calls using artificial intelligence to mimic voices of people you might know are being used to exploit unsuspecting members of the public. These calls use what’s known as generative AI, which refers to systems capable of creating text, images or any other media such as video, based on prompts from a user.
Deepfakes have gained notoriety over the last few years with a number of high-profile incidents, such as English actress Emma Watson’s likeness being used in a series of suggestive advertisements that appeared on Facebook and Instagram.
There was also the widely shared – and debunked – video from 2022 in which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appeared to tell Ukrainians to “lay down arms.”
Now, the technology to create an audio deepfake, a realistic copy of a person’s voice, is becoming increasingly common.
To create a realistic copy of someone’s voice you need data to train the algorithm. This means having lots of audio recordings of your intended target’s voice. The more examples of the person’s voice that you can feed into the algorithms, the better and more convincing the eventual copy will be.
Many of us already share details of our daily lives on the Internet. This means the audio data required to create a realistic copy of a voice could be readily available on social media.
But what happens once a copy is out there? What is the worst that can happen?
A deepfake algorithm could enable anyone in possession of the data to make “you” say whatever they want. In practice, this can be as simple as writing out some text and getting the computer to say it out loud in what sounds like your voice.
Major challenges
This capability risks increasing the prevalence of audio misinformation and disinformation. It can be used to try to influence international or national public opinion, as seen with the “videos” of Zelensky.
But the ubiquity and availability of these technologies pose significant challenges at a local level too – particularly in the growing trend of AI scam calls.
Many people will have received a scam or phishing call that tells us, for example, that our computer has been compromised and we must immediately log in, potentially giving the caller access to our data.
It is often very easy to spot that this is a hoax, especially when the caller is making requests that someone from a legitimate organization would not. However, now imagine that the voice on the other end of the phone is not just a stranger, but sounds exactly like a friend or loved one. This injects a whole new level of complexity, and panic, for the unlucky recipient.
A report by CNN highlights an incident where a mother received a call from an unknown number. When she answered the phone, it was her daughter. The daughter had allegedly been kidnapped and was phoning her mother to pass on a ransom demand. In fact, the girl was safe and sound. The scammers had made a deepfake of her voice.
This is not an isolated incident, with variations of the scam including a supposed car accident, where the victim calls their family for money to help them out after a crash.
Old trick using new tech
This is not a new scam in itself; the term “virtual kidnapping scam” has been around for several years. It can take many forms, but a common approach is to trick victims into paying a ransom to free a loved one they believe is being threatened. The scammer tries to establish unquestioning compliance in order to get the victim to pay a quick ransom before the deception is discovered.
However, the dawn of powerful and available AI technologies has upped the ante significantly – and made things more personal. It is one thing to hang up on an anonymous caller, but it takes real confidence in your judgment to hang up on a call from someone sounding just like your child or partner.
There is software that can used to identify deepfakes, and will create a visual representation of the audio called a spectrogram. When you are listening to the call it might seem impossible to tell it apart from the real person, but voices can be distinguished when spectrograms are analyzed side-by-side. At least one group has offered detection software for download, though such solutions may still require some technical knowledge to use.
Most people will not be able to generate spectrograms, so what can you do when you are not certain what you are hearing is the real thing? As with any other form of media, you might come across: Be skeptical.
If you receive a call from a loved one out of the blue and she asks you for money or makes requests that seem out of character, call her back or send her a text to confirm you really are talking to her.
As the capabilities of AI expand, the lines between reality and fiction will increasingly blur. And it is not likely that we will be able to put the technology back in the box. This means that people will need to become more cautious.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
China needs better and deeper bond markets
As Chinese tech equities rally, tensions building up in the US$20 trillion bond market risk pulling the rug out from under the sudden rush of bullish stock market sentiment.
China’s Big Tech shares are surging after Premier Li Qiang signaled a sharper pivot away from regulatory crackdowns toward championing the private sector.
Just days after letting Jack Ma’s Ant Group off with a nearly US$1 billion fine, Beijing said it’s increasing support for Tencent and other top tech platforms to raise China’s innovative game.
On July 12, Li said President Xi Jinping’s government is stepping up efforts to normalize China’s regulatory environment. The goal, Li said, is to “reduce the costs of compliance and promote the healthy development of industry.”
Li said that “on the journey of building a modern socialist country, the platform economy has great potential.”
He told tech chieftains in the audience – including officials from Alibaba Group, TikTok owner ByteDance and food delivery group Meituan – to “push to increase their international competitiveness and dare to compete on the global stage.”
To analyst Kelvin Wong at OANDA, “the latest rhetoric from the top man of China’s State Council is likely to boost positive animal spirits, in the short term at least.”
But China faces a longer-term threat to positive sentiment now shining on Asia’s biggest economy: a bond market that’s still not ready for global prime time.
Credit market strains are spreading as two large property builders reneged on a combined US$608 million worth of bond payments. Meanwhile, top mainland banks are avoiding the purchase of local notes, including in the Shanghai free trade zone.
The inclusion of Chinese government bonds in top global bond indexes, including the FTSE Russell benchmark, has pulled giant tidal waves of capital China’s way.
This opening has been a game changer — offering myriad opportunities to build diversified and resilient portfolios via new asset classes to ride the nation’s development.
The trouble is, though, China’s bond market is underpinned by a developing economy with limited liquidity and hedging tools, a giant and opaque state sector, and a rudimentary credit-rating system that often obscures risk and enables the misallocation of capital.
For all of China’s promises, this makes it more of a buyer-beware market in 2023 than many investors expected. It was 10 years ago, after all, that Xi took power pledging to let market forces play the “decisive” role in financial reform decisions.
The split screens of the last two years tell the story. On one screen, China’s inclusion in major benchmarks is luring bond giants like BlackRock Inc.
On screen No 2, the crisis of confidence among creditors of China Evergrande Group offers a stark reminder of the mainland’s opacity and excesses.
The globe’s most indebted property developer owes them more than $120 billion, potentially posing system risks.
For the rest of 2023, analysts at HSBC Holdings and Goldman Sachs recently raised projections for defaults among junk-rated property bonds to about 30%.
“If property sales remain lackluster with a lack of stimulus from the authorities, we do not rule out the possibility of a further uplift in default rates,” says HSBC analyst Keith Chan.
Chairman Yu Liang at China Vanke Co, the nation’s second-largest developer by sales, says the real estate sector is looking “worse than expected.”
The property industry is “indeed seeing pressure in the short-term,” Yu says. The “real situation,” he concluded, “is a bit worse than what was expected.”
The magnitude of the risks has many economists perplexed about why the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) central bank isn’t acting more forcefully.
Recent “easing, which focused on developer financing, is far from enough to stabilize the sector,” says economist Larry Hu at Macquarie Group. “After all, credit risk for banks would remain elevated if the housing market stays weak.”
One reason: the yuan’s nearly 4% drop this year makes it harder for higher-indebted developers to make payments on US dollar-denominated debt.
The PBOC’s restraint also could mean government steps to stabilize the property sector are soon on the way.
“Looking ahead,” Hu notes, “expect to see more easing on the demand side, such as lowering the down payment ratio and easing purchase restrictions.”
The real challenge, though, is fixing the property sector, which can generate as much as one-third of gross domestic product (GDP) in good times.
Kate Jaquet, a portfolio manager at Seafarer Capital Partners, says that “beyond the importance of this sector to the overall health of the Chinese economy, another motivation for orderly restructurings of the many troubled property developers is the extensive and opaque web of their liabilities.
“Stakeholders in the restructuring process – roughly in order of payment preference – include contractors and suppliers, banks, homebuyers, wealth management product investors and, finally, bondholders.”
Jaquet adds that “there are also off-balance sheet liabilities and other hidden debts to consider. Investors, rightly concerned over the lack of disclosures, struggle to understand some of these off-balance sheet – and largely heretofore hidden – debts. These concerns are further compounded by property developers’ failure to file audited annual results with the relevant authorities.”
The bottom line, Jaquet says, is that “hasty or ham-fisted restructurings might require write-downs by holders of these lesser-understood obligations, which could have unforeseen consequences in other parts of the Chinese economy. It seems that China’s regulators know this and are taking a careful and measured approach to property sector restructurings, particularly the big ones.”
Considering the large role that property plays in China’s economy, “a great deal hangs in the balance with respect to restructuring in the property sector,” Jaquet says. “The details of how onshore and offshore creditors fare – in absolute terms, and relative to one another – matters a lot for the future health of China’s bond markets”
Jaquet says that “hopefully the restructurings will consider corporate governance and the rights of creditors. Lack of ready access to international capital markets will take a toll on this sector. While it is increasingly clear that the days of housing driving the Chinese economy are likely over, the big question is: where do the funds come from to keep the economy on an even keel?”
One ever-present time bomb: China’s $9 trillion-plus market in local-government financing vehicles (LGFVs) that opaquely finance everything from airports to power grids to roads and rarely raise enough to cover their obligations.
That requires bigger capital injections from municipalities that should be using the funds to build bigger social safety nets and invest in human capital.
China’s ongoing real estate crisis made matters worse. Cash flow pressures weighing on local governments have state-owned banking giants struggling to stave off a credit crunch. If China’s bond markets were more developed and robust, authorities would have more options to defuse blowups in credit markets.
The dearth of alternatives means that when, say, state pension entities sell off weaker bond holdings, it destabilizes the broader market. That, in turn, adds to the headwinds faced by LGFVs and property developers, causing new sentiment-killing feedback effects.
While offloading weaker bonds may help the state pension protect the value of its investments, it risks heightening market concerns about the health of LGFVs and developers at a time when Beijing is trying to restore confidence in the world’s second-largest economy.
Now, both LGFVs and developers are shortening the time intervals for extending credit and demanding higher borrowing costs.
“The most important variables impacting China’s economic growth over the next two years will be the success or failure of local government debt restructuring, and Beijing’s approach to the role of local government investment within China’s economy in the future,” analysts at Rhodium Group write in a new report. “A collapse in local government investment would be comparable to the economic impact of the crisis in the property market.”
All this has Beijing mulling fresh moves to support cash-strapped cities and counties around the nation. According to local press reports, this could entail green-lighting municipalities to boost bond issuance programs to finance the clearing away of hidden debt.
Reducing the prevalence of new LGFVs has never been more important. At the start of 2023, S&P Global Ratings estimated these schemes amounted to 40% of China’s non-financial corporate bond market.
The prevalence of LGFVs can be a major turnoff for foreign bond funds. Not only are they opaque and difficult to analyze, their fingerprints touch the operations of everything from commercial banks’ wealth management units to mutual funds to hedge funds to insurers to the gamut of securities companies.
Hence the urgent need for deeper bond markets. And, of course, for regulators in Beijing to avoid steps that spook global markets anew. Among recent missteps by Xi’s Community Party: this year’s clampdown on foreign consultancy firms on which global investors and multinational firms rely to navigate their way through China’s opaque companies and systems.
The move, supposedly part of a nationwide anti-espionage campaign, reduced the appetite for investment from overseas firms. When US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently visited Beijing, the consultancy policy was among the examples of “non-market” practices and “coercive actions” against American firms her team highlighted.
Deeper debt markets would help sort out the cart-before-the-horse problem that afflicts China’s economy.
During the Xi era and before it, China too often believed that pulling in more foreign capital was a reform all its own. However, it’s been slower to strengthen China’s financial system to efficiently absorb those waves of overseas capital.
For example, China’s inclusion in the World Trade Organization in 2001 did less to recalibrate its growth engines than to remake the global economic system to its advantage.
The 2016 inclusion of the yuan in the International Monetary Fund’s “special drawing rights” didn’t stop Beijing from imposing capital controls or accelerate capital liberalization nearly as much as hoped.
In 2019, A-share stocks’ addition to the MSCI index didn’t suddenly make China’s financial system sounder, the government more transparent, companies more shareholder-friendly or the ginormous shadow-banking world any less of a menace.
Strengthening China Inc. requires significant heavy lifting to curb the dominance of state-owned enterprises, increase economic space for the private sector and eliminate the risk of dueling bubbles in debt, credit and assets.
The key now, says Li Yunze, head of the National Financial Regulatory Administration, is for vibrant debt capital markets to help catalyze growth of all sectors, but particularly those in the high-tech space — the realm Premier Li has been at least rhetorically elevating in recent months.
While it’s important Beijing ends the regulatory volatility of recent years, he adds, more efficient capital markets would accelerate China’s move upmarket.
One priority should be building a big and liquid mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market. The good news is that interest in securitized mortgage loans used to finance residential and commercial buildings is growing, particularly in the green space, says Fitch Ratings analyst Jingwei Jia.
This comes, Jia says, “as the Chinese government prioritizes construction of environmentally friendly buildings to meet its climate targets.”
As Jian Chen, an analyst at MSCI, notes, China’s residential MBS market is growing as global investors eye its relatively high yields and seek diversification options for fixed-income portfolios.
However, he adds, “attracting new foreign investment to Chinese RMBS may depend on improving credit ratings and transparency in data and pricing.”
Another positive sign could be the ways in which LGFVs may be pivoting to issuing more infrastructure real estate investment trusts (REITs). This, says analyst Sherry Zhao, also at Fitch, follows “the authorities’ latest reiteration of the significance of selling infrastructure assets to improve capital efficiency and reduce public-sector leverage.”
Zhao notes that “this is especially for infrastructure assets closely aligned with LGFVs’ public policy roles, such as transportation, public rental housing, urban utilities, and industrial parks, among others.”
When it comes to the direction of reform, the need for a deeper bond market must be goal No 1. The financial opening that Xi and Li claim to be pursuing suggests they are scaling back China’s command economy. This alone should reassure foreign investors.
But the opening China really needs is deeper capital markets, in particular more transparent debt markets. Boosting support for – and loans to – the property sector are fine for today. China coming into its own as a top and productive economy, though, requires a serious bonding experience.
Follow William Pesek on Twitter at @WilliamPesek
Indonesian President Jokowi warns ASEAN ‘can’t be proxy’ of any country
The Jakarta meetings have been joined by both China and the United States, whose top diplomats met on Thursday on the sidelines in the Indonesian capital. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned China’s Wang Yi of consequences after a cybersecurity breach blamed on China again threatened to undermine aContinue Reading
Japan rocket engine explodes during test: Official
A Japanese rocket engine exploded during a test on Friday, an official said, in the latest blow to the country’s space agency. The Epsilon S – an improved version of the Epsilon rocket that failed to launch in October 2022 – blew up “roughly 50 seconds after ignition”, science andContinue Reading
Hun Sen uses Pita defeat to warn critics
Cambodian strongman says he’s not meddling in Thai affairs and is willing to work with any government
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has used the occasion of Pita Limjaroenrat’s failure to win the Thai prime ministerial vote to attack the opposition in his own country.
But the veteran strongman insists he is not meddling in Thai politics and is willing to work with Mr Pita if he and his Move Forward Party (MFP) form the next government in Thailand.
The comments came just a few weeks after the Cambodian premier falsely claimed that Move Forward had a policy to repatriate migrant workers to neighbouring countries.
“I declare today that Pita’s failure to get enough votes to be Thai prime minister is a major failure of the brute opposition in Cambodia,” Hun Sen wrote in a post on his Twitter account on Thursday night.
“This does not mean that I am interfering in Thailand’s internal affairs. My point is that in the past, these traitors always expected that when Pita becomes the prime minister of Thailand, they would use Thai territory to campaign against the Royal Government of Cambodia.
“Now the expectations of the brute opposition group have vanished like salt in water. Do not take part in politics that depend on somebody else.”
The implication appears to be that under a Move Forward government, Thailand might be less inclined to deport political dissidents from other countries, especially its authoritarian neighbours. Earlier this month, a member of the opposition Candlelight Party of Cambodia was arrested in Bangkok and sent to an immigration detention centre. His current status is not known.
The earlier tweet from Hun Sen appears to have been deleted, but it was followed on Friday by a clarification in which he wrote: “I am not against Mr Pita and am ready to work together in the event that Mr Pita leads the Thai government.
“I respect the decisions of the Thai people and will not interfere in the internal affairs of Thailand. I am ready to work with Thai leaders no matter who or what party they come from.
“Extremist Khmer groups using Thai territory for activities against Cambodia, including using the name of Mr Pita for political gain, should stop this action. Who relies on the breath of others to destroy their own nation?”
Hun Sen himself is facing an election on July 23 but the outcome is already known. The Election Commission earlier banned the only meaningful opposition party remaining and a court upheld the ban.
Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) won every seat in the 2018 national election after a court dissolved the Cambodia National Rescue Party.
Wang tells Blinken to ‘work with China’ on improving US ties
BEIJING: Beijing’s top diplomat Wang Yi has urged Washington to “work with China” to improve ties during a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Chinese foreign ministry said on Friday (Jul 14). The discussion on the sidelines of Southeast Asian talks in Jakarta on Thursday was theContinue Reading
Woman who kept suing NUS after she failed to obtain degree given court order to stop
SINGAPORE: A woman who kept suing the National University of Singapore (NUS) after it terminated her candidature in 2006 has been restrained from pursuing any court action over the issue for two years.
Ms Jeanne-Marie Ten Leu Jiun was in a dispute with her supervisor and the ensuing developments led to the termination of her candidature.
In response, she launched multiple court actions against the university, seeking damages for several issues, including breach of contract, intimidation and negligence.
NUS turned to the High Court seeking an extended civil restraint order to stop Ms Ten from commencing any action or application in any court related to this issue.
In a judgment issued on Thursday (Jul 13), Justice Kwek Mean Luck granted NUS’ application and imposed a civil restraint order of two years on Ms Ten, the maximum period allowed.
Justice Kwek found that Ms Ten had “persistently commenced actions or made applications that are totally without merit”, pointing to the actions that were ruled to be so between 2020 and 2022.
However, he allowed Ms Ten to continue to pursue an ongoing case where she is seeking to privately prosecute then-NUS professor Lily Kong for perjury and obstruction of justice.
BACKGROUND
According to previous judgments in 2018 and 2021, Ms Ten completed her undergraduate studies at the University of East Anglia in 2000.
She began her candidature for the degree of Masters of Arts (Architecture) by research in January 2002 at the NUS School of Design and Environment, after NUS offered her admission and a research scholarship that she accepted.
She was supposed to complete her course and obtain her master’s degree by mid-2005. As a requirement, she had to complete a 40,000-word thesis, supervised by Dr Wong Yunn Chii, in order to graduate.
However, Ms Ten had disagreements with Dr Wong. She accused him of using her work in a project without acknowledging her.
After a confrontation about this, Dr Wong left without signing Ms Ten’s thesis submission form. According to him, he did not realise that he had not signed the supervisor’s report form.
Ms Ten submitted her thesis two days late, after getting a stand-in to sign on her form and obtaining an extension of her deadline.
She later wrote to school authorities to complain about Dr Wong, asking for him to be removed as her supervisor, but the Head of Department saw no reason to do so.
A Committee of Inquiry (COI), which included Prof Kong, was set up to look into Ms Ten’s complaint about Dr Wong’s conduct. The COI concluded that, among other things, Dr Wong had failed to comply fully with his duties as Ms Ten’s supervisor, and recommended that Dr Wong be censured for this failure.
However, when Prof Kong conveyed the findings to Ms Ten, she did not mention this finding of the COI.
Ms Ten later complained that the COI’s process was inadequate and lacked transparency. She had further disagreements with NUS about the requirements she needed to fulfil to receive her master’s degree.
She had been told that the examiners would be recommending to the Board of Graduate Studies that she be awarded the degree, but this was subject to her giving a more detailed account and analysis of certain areas in her thesis and making some changes.
Ms Ten was told that she had to submit an electronic thesis or dissertation submission form and a copy of her finalised thesis in a certain format, within a month.
Another professor was assigned for Ms Ten to consult on the changes to be made to her thesis.
However, Ms Ten continued to ask questions about her complaints against Dr Wong and objected to her thesis being sent for examination.
In the end, even though Ms Ten made the required revisions to her thesis, she did not comply with all the steps required. She did not upload the thesis electronically, nor sign and submit a required form.
As a result, NUS terminated her candidature in September 2006 before she obtained her master’s degree.
In Justice Woo Bih Li’s judgment dismissing her claims against NUS in 2018, he said he had “some sympathy” for Ms Ten, but that she “has only herself to blame”.
He said she allowed her view and distrust of Dr Wong to cloud her judgment in her interaction with those she complained to.
“While quick to criticise others, she could not see her own prejudices and how difficult she appeared to others. Her repetitive complaints about the examination process even after the successful outcome of the examination is perhaps one of the best illustrations of her jaundiced perception,” said Justice Woo.
“Her inability to differentiate between her complaints about Dr Wong and the requirements she had to comply with has led her to the unfortunate situation she finds herself in,” he added.
Meraque bags ASEAN award at Global Youth Innovation & Entrepreneurship Competition in Shandong
Offered a partnership by Shandong govt to establish a manufacturing facility in China
It holds the largest market share for drone spraying services in Malaysia
Meraque Group, a Malaysian company that delivers Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and robotic technologies solutions, announced it won the Global Youth award at the Global Youth Innovation & Entrepreneurship Competition…Continue Reading
Buying Taylor Swift resale tickets? Here’s how to avoid getting scammed
HOW TO AVOID GETTING SCAMMED
A spokesperson from Carousell cautioned: “Buyers who purchase tickets from third-party vendors will generally increase the risk of dealing with scammers, who may be selling counterfeit or stolen tickets.”
So what do you do if you do decide to try your luck buying from resellers online? How do you avoid getting scammed?
1. Be wary of those asking for a deposit
First of all, be very wary of those asking for deposits. A quick check on Carousell showed many sellers of Taylor Swift tickets requesting for a non-refundable deposit of 50 per cent or more for these.
Why is this problematic? It’s because the actual tickets (assuming these are even real) have not been disbursed to the original purchaser by Ticketmaster just yet and will only do so weeks before the shows in March 2024.
According to the US Ticketmaster website, this delayed delivery system is meant to “prevent tickets from being accessed until we can confirm everyone has adhered to the event ticket limit and didn’t use unfair ticket technology to buy in bulk.”
So any screenshots of confirmation emails from Ticketmaster that listings display could be fabricated or stolen online.
Heavy rain hits South Korea causing power cuts and evacuations
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