Proton Move: What about the TON Foundation?
June 17, 2025
Surveillance laws are straight out of dystopian novels and they’ve become a reality. Proton mail is a popular alternative to Gmail and in response to a controversial spying bill they’re not happy says TechRadar: “"We Would Be Less Confidential Than Google" – Proton Threatens To Quit Switzerland Over New Surveillance Law."
Switzerland’s new surveillance law would require all social networks, VPNs, and messaging apps to identity and retain user data. Currently only mobile networks and ISPs are only required to do this. Proton mail provides users with VPN and encrypted email services. They’re not happy about this potential new law and they’ve threatened to leave Switzerland.
Proton’s CEO said:
“In an interview with RTS (Radio Télévision Suisse) on May 13, 2025, Proton CEO Andy Yen slammed the proposed amendment as a ‘major violation of the right to privacy’ that will also harm the country’s reputation and its ability to compete on an international level. ‘This revision attempts to implement something that has been deemed illegal in the EU and the United States. The only country in Europe with a roughly equivalent law is Russia,’ said Yen…. ‘’I think we would have no choice but to leave Switzerland,’ said Yen. ‘The law would become almost identical to the one in force today in Russia. It’s an untenable situation. We would be less confidential as a company in Switzerland than Google, based in the United States. So it’s impossible for our business model.’”
The new law would add three new types of information and two types of monitoring. Other tech companies and leaders are against the law.
Switzerland is the bastion of neutrality in Europe. In Zug, Switzerland, the TON Foundation (aka ONF and The Open Network Foundation) works to build support for Telegram’s blockchain, its Telegram-developed crypto currency, and its realigned management team. Will Swiss regulators take a more proactive approach to this interesting non-governmental organization?
Here’s a left-field idea: What if the Proton is a dry-run for some Telegram-related action?
Whitney Grace, June 17, 2025
Telegram, a Stylish French Dog Collar, and Mom Saying, “Pavel Clean Up Your Room!”
June 4, 2025
Just a dinobaby operating without AI. What do you expect? A free newsletter and an old geezer. Do those statements sound like dorky detritus?
Pavel Durov has a problem with France. The country’s judiciary let him go back home after an eight month stay-cation. However, Mr. Durov is not the type of person to enjoy having a ring in his nose and a long strand of red tape connecting him to his new mom back in Paris. Pavel wants to live an Airbnb life, but he has to find a way to get his French mom to say, “Okay, Pavel, you can go out with your friends but you have to be home by 9 pm Paris time.” If he does not comply, Mr. Durov is learning that the French government can make life miserable: There’s the monitoring. There’s the red tape. There’s the reminder that France has some wonderful prison facilities in France, North Africa, and Guiana (like where’s that, Pavel?). But worst of all, Mr. Durov does not have his beloved freedom.
He learned this when he blew off a French request to block certain content from Telegram into Romania. For details, click here. What happened?
The first reminder was a jerk on his stylish French when the 40 year old was told, “Pavel, you cannot go to the US.” The write up “France Denies Telegram Founder Pavel Durov’s Request to Visit US” reported on May 22, 2025:
France has denied a request by Telegram founder Pavel Durov to travel to the United States for talks with investment funds, prosecutors…
For an advocate of “freedom,” Mr. Durov has just been told, “Pavel, go to your room.”
Mr. Durov, a young-at-heart 40 year old with oodles of loving children, wanted to travel from Dubai to Oslo, Norway. The reason was for Mr. Durov to travel to a conference about freedom. The French, those often viewed as people who certify chickens for quality, told Mr. Durov, “Pavel, you are grounded. Go back to your room and clean it up.”
Then another sharp pull and in public, causing the digital poodle to yelp. The Human Rights Foundation’s PR team published “French Courts Block Telegram Founder Pavel from Attending Oslo Freedom Forum.” That write up explained:
A French court has denied Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s request to travel to Norway in order to speak at the Oslo Freedom Forum on Tuesday, May 27. Durov had been invited to speak at the global gathering of activists, hosted annually by the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), on the topic of free speech, surveillance, and digital rights.
I interpret this decision by the French judiciary as making clear to Pavel Durov that he is not “free” and that he may be at risk of being sent to a summer camp in one of France’s salubrious facilities for those who don’t like to follow the rules. He is a French citizen, and I assume that he is learning that being allowed to leave France is not a get-out-of-jail free card. I would suggest that not even his brother, the fellow with two PhDs or his colleagues in his “core” engineering team can come up with what I call the “French problem.” My hunch is that these very intelligent people have considered that the French might expand their scope of interest to include the legal entities for Telegram and the “gee, it is not part of our operation” TON Foundation, its executives, and their ancillary business interests. The French did produce some nifty math about probabilities, and I have a hunch that the probability of the French judiciary fuzzifying the boundary between Pavel Durov and these other individuals is creeping up… quickly.
Pavel Durov is on a bureaucratic leash. The French judiciary have jerked Mr. Durov’s neck twice and quite publicly.
The question becomes, “What’s Mr. Durov going to do?” The fellow has a French collar with a leasch connecting him to the savvy French judiciary?
Allow this dinobaby to offer several observations:
- He will talk with his lawyers Kaminski and learn that France’s legal and police system does indeed have an interest in high-quality chickens as well as a prime specimen like Pavel Durov. In short, that fowl will be watched, probed, and groomed. Mr. Durov is experiencing how those ducks, geese, and chickens on French farms live before the creatures find themselves in a pot after plucking and plucking forcefully.
- Mr. Durov will continue to tidy Telegram to the standards of cleanliness enforced at the French Foreign Legion training headquarters. He is making progress on the money laundering front. He is cleaning up pointers to adult and other interesting Telegram content which has had 13 years to plant roots and support a veritable forest of allegedly illegal products and services. More effort is likely to be needed. Did I mention that dog crates are used to punish trainees who don’t get the bed making and ironing up to snuff? The crates are located in front of the drill field to make it easy for fellow trainees to see who has created the extra duties for the squad. It can be warm near Marseille for dog crates exposed to the elements.
- The competition is beginning to become visible. The charming Mark Zuckerberg, the delightful Elon Musk, and the life-of-the-AI-party Sam Altman are accelerating their efforts to release an everything application with some Telegram “features.” One thing is certain, a Pavel Durov does not have the scope or “freedom” of operation he had before his fateful trip to Paris in August 2024. Innovation at Telegram seems to be confined to “gifts” and STARS. Exciting stuff as TONcoin disappoints
Net net: Pavel Durov faces some headwinds, and these are not the gusts blasting up and down the narrow streets of Dubai, the US, or Norway. He has a big wind machine planted in front of his handsome visage and the blades are not rotating at full speed. Will France crank up the RPMs, Pavel? Do goose livers swell under certain conditions? Yep, a lot.
Stephen E Arnold, June 4, 2025
When Unicode Characters Masquerade as ASCII
June 4, 2025
Curl founder and lead developer Daniel Stenberg suggests methods for “Detecting Malicious Unicode.” The advice comes after human reviewers missed look-alike characters that had been swapped in for regular letters. We learn:
“In a recent educational trick, curl contributor James Fuller submitted a pull-request to the project in which he suggested a larger cleanup of a set of scripts. In a later presentation, he could show us how not a single human reviewer in the team nor any CI job had spotted or remarked on one of the changes he included: he replaced an ASCII letter with a Unicode alternative in a URL. This was an eye-opener to several of us and we decided we needed to up our game.”
Since such swaps cannot be detected by human eyeballs alone, special software is needed. Stenberg found GitHub’s abilities lacking, though apparently the organization is on the case. Fellow curl dev Victor Szakats found Gitea at least highlights “ambiguous Unicode characters,” but Stenberg wanted more than that. So he made a detection tool himself. He writes:
“We have implemented checks to help us poor humans spot things like this. To detect malicious Unicode. We have added a CI job that scans all files and validates every UTF-8 sequence in the git repository. In the curl git repository most files and most content are plain old ASCII so we can “easily” whitelist a small set of UTF-8 sequences and some specific files, the rest of the files are simply not allowed to use UTF-8 at all as they will then fail the CI job and turn up red. … The next time someone tries this stunt on us it could be someone with less good intentions, but now ideally our CI will tell us.”
Ideally. We think if these swaps are being identified by "researchers," cybersecurity vendors need to address the issue.
Cynthia Murrell, June 4, 2025
Bad Actors Game Spotify Algorithm to Advertise Drugs
June 3, 2025
Pill pushers slipped under Spotify’s guard, such as it is, to promote their wares. Ars Technica reports, “Spotify Caught Hosting Hundreds of Fake Podcasts that Advertise Selling Drugs.” Citing reporting from Business Insider and CNN, writer Ashley Belanger tells us Spotify took down some 200 podcasts that advertised controlled substances. We learn:
“Some of the podcasts may have raised a red flag for a human moderator—with titles like ‘My Adderall Store’ or ‘Xtrapharma.com’ and episodes titled ‘Order Codeine Online Safe Pharmacy Louisiana’ or ‘Order Xanax 2 mg Online Big Deal On Christmas Season,’ CNN reported. But Spotify’s auto-detection did not flag the fake podcasts for removal. Some of them remained up for months, CNN reported, which could create trouble for the music streamer at a time when the US government is cracking down on illegal drug sales online. … BI found that many podcast episodes featured a computerized voice and were under a minute long, while CNN noted some episodes were as short as 10 seconds. Some of them didn’t contain any audio at all, BI reported.”
The CNN piece also observed AI tools now make voice generation very simple and, according to the Tech Transparency Project’s Katie Paul, voice content is much harder to moderate than text. Paul suspects Spotify may not be very motivated to root out violations. After all, like other platforms, it enjoys the protection of Section 230. CNN was unable to verify how many users listened to these podcasts or whether one could actually purchase drugs through their links. But why provide the links if not to attract buyers? Also, we know this:
“The podcasts were promoted in top results for searches for various prescription drugs that some users may have conducted on the platform in search of legitimate health-related podcasts.”
Ah, algorithm gaming at its finest. Spotify says all fake podcasts flagged by reporters were taken down but was vague about measures to prevent similar posts in the future. What a surprise.
Cynthia Murrell, June 3, 2025
xAI and Telegram: What Will the Durovs Do? The Clock Is Ticking
May 28, 2025
Just a dinobaby and no AI: How horrible an approach?
One of my colleagues called my attention to the Coindesk online service’s article “Telegram Signs $300M Deal with Elon Musk’s xAI to Integrate Grok into Its Messaging App, TON up 16%.” The subtitle is interesting:
Telegram Will Also Received 50% of Revenue from xAI Subscriptions Sold via the App
If one views Telegram as a simple messaging app, Telegram itself has not done much to infuse its “mini app” with AI functions. However, Telegram bot developers have. Dozens of bots include AI features. The most popular smart software among bot developers is, based on my team’s research, a toss up between open source AI and ChatGPT. If our information are correct, Elon Musk now has a conduit to the Telegram user base. Depending on what source you select, Telegram has 900 to one billion users. How many are humans with an actual mobile phone number? We don’t know, and I am not sure law enforcement knows until the investigators try to match a mobile number with a person, a company, or some mysterious off shore entity with offices in the Seychelles or a similarly flexible nation.
The write up says:
Telegram founder Pavel Durov, revealed on X, that the two companies agreed to a 1-year partnership that would see Telegram receive $300 million in cash and equity from xAI, in addition to 50% of revenues from xAI subscriptions sold via Telegram.
Let’s pull out the allegedly true factoids:
- The deal is a one-year partnership. In the world of the French judiciary, one-year can be a generous amount of time to de-rail the Telegram operation. Mr. Durov’s criticism of France with regards to the Romanian elections and increasing criticism of the French government may add risk to the xAI deal. With Pavel Durov in France between August 2024 and March 2025, Telegram’s pace of innovation stalled on STARs token fiddling, not AI.
- Mr. Musk’s willingness to sign up a sales channel for Grok may be related to the prevalence of Sam Altman’s AI system in third-party bots for customer support and performing a steadily increasing range of Telegram-centric functions. Because Telegram’s approach to messaging allows bots to move across boundaries between blockchains as well as traditional Web services, Telegram’s bot ecosystem should deliver, Mr. Musk hopes, an alternative AI to bot developers and provide a new source of users to the Grok smart software.
- The “equity” angle is interesting. Equity in what? xAI or some other property. Perhaps — just perhaps — Mr. Musk becomes a stakeholder in Telegram. Mr. Musk wants to convert X.com into an “everything” service, a dream shared with Sam Altman. Mr. Altman is not a particularly enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Musk. Mr. Musk is equally disenchanted with Mr. Altman. The love triangle will be interesting to observe as the days click toward the end of the one year tie up between Telegram and xAI.
Another angle on the deal was offered by the online information service Watcher.Guru. “Elon Musk’s xAI Joins Telegram in $300M Grok Partnership”, speculates":
This integration has addressed several critical pain points that crypto users face across multiple essential areas daily. Many people find blockchain technology overwhelming, and the complexity often prevents them from fully engaging with digital assets right now. By leveraging AI assistance directly within Telegram, users can get help with crypto-related questions, market analysis, and blockchain education without leaving their messaging app. The AI integration revolutionizes security by providing tools that identify crypto scams. This becomes valuable given how scams prevail on messaging platforms.
The cited paragraph makes clear that convergence is coming among smart software, social media services with hefty user counts, and crypto currency. However, the idea that smart software will prevent fraud causes me to chortle. Crypto is, in my opinion, a fraudulent enterprise. Mashing up the Telegram system with X.com binds a range of alleged criminal activities to a communications system that can be shaped to promote quite specific propaganda. Toss in crypto, and what do you get? Answer: More cyber crime.
Will this union create a happy, sunny user experience free from human trafficking, online gambling, and the sale of contraband? One can only hope, but this tie up has to prove that it delivers a positive, constructive user experience. When Sam Altman releases his everything app, will X.com be positioned to be a worthy competitor? Will Elon Musk purchase Telegram and compete with proven technology, a large user base, and a team of core engineers able to create a slam dunk product and service?
Good questions. Unlike Watcher.Guru’s observation that “AI integration revolutionizes security”, the disposition of the deal between Messers. Durov and Musk is unknown. (Oh, how can AI integration revolutionize security when the services are not yet integrated.) Oh, well, close enough for horse shoes.
Stephen E Arnold, May 28, 2025
Sharp Words about US Government Security
May 22, 2025
No AI. Just a dinobaby who gets revved up with buzzwords and baloney.
On Monday (April 29, 2025), I am headed to the US National Cyber Crime Conference. I am 80, and I don’t do too many “in person” lectures. Heck, I don’t do too many lectures anymore period. A candidate for the rest home or an individual ready for a warehouse for the soon-to-die is a unicorn amidst the 25 to 50 year old cyber fraud, law enforcement professionals, and government investigators.
In my lectures, I steer clear of political topics. This year, I have been assigned a couple of topics which the NCCC organizers know attract a couple of people out of the thousand or so attendees. One topic concerns changes in the Dark Web. Since I wrote “Dark Web Notebook” years ago, my team and I keep track of what’s new and interesting in the world of the Dark Web. This year, I will highlight three or four services which caught our attention. The other topic is my current research project: Telegram. I am not sure how I became interested in this messaging service, but my team and I will will make available to law enforcement, crime analysts, and cyber fraud investigators a monograph modeled on the format we used for the “Dark Web Notebook.”
I am in a security mindset before the conference. I am on the lookout for useful information which I can use as a point of reference or as background information. Despite my age, I want to appear semi competent. Thus, I read “Signalgate Lessons Learned: If Creating a Culture of Security Is the Goal, America Is Screwed.” I think the source publication is British. The author may be an American journalist.
Several points in the write up caught my attention.
First, the write up makes a statement I found interesting:
And even if they are using Signal, which is considered the gold-standard for end-to-end chat encryption, there’s no guarantee their personal devices haven’t been compromised with some sort of super-spyware like Pegasus, which would allow attackers to read the messages once they land on their phones.
I did not know that Signal was “considered the gold standard for end-to-end chat encryption.” I wonder if there are some data to back this up.
Second, is NSO Group’s Pegasus “super spyware.” My information suggests that there are more modern methods. Some link to Israel but others connect to other countries; for example, Spain, the former Czech Republic, and others. I am not sure what “super” means, and the write up does not offer much other than a nebulous adjectival “super spyware.”
Third, these two references are fascinating:
“The Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon campaigns out of China demonstrate this ongoing threat to our telecom systems. Circumventing the Pentagon’s security protocol puts sensitive intelligence in jeopardy.”
The authority making the statement is a former US government official who went on to found a cyber security company. There were publicized breaches, and I am not sure comparable to Pegasus type of data exfiltration method. “Insider threats” are different from lousy software from established companies with vulnerabilities as varied as Joseph’s multi-colored coat. An insider, of course, is an individual presumed to be “trusted”; however, that entity provides information for money to an individual who wants to compromise a system, a person who makes an error (honest or otherwise), and victims who fall victim to quite sophisticated malware specifically designed to allow targeted emails designed to obtain information to compromise that person or a system. In fact, the most sophisticated of these “phishing” attack systems are available for about $250 per month for the basic version with higher fees associated with more robust crime as a service vectors of compromise.
The opinion piece seems to focus on a single issue focused on one of the US government’s units. I am okay with that; however, I think a slightly different angle would put the problem and challenge of “security” in a context less focused on ad hominin rhetorical methods.
Stephen E Arnold, May 22, 2025
AI: Improving Spam Quality, Reach, and Effectiveness
May 22, 2025
It is time to update our hoax detectors. The Register warns, “Generative AI Makes Fraud Fluent—from Phishing Lures to Fake Lovers.” What a great phrase: “fluent fraud.” We can see it on a line of hats and t-shirts. Reporter Iain Thomson consulted security pros Chester Wisniewski of Sophos and Kevin Brown at NCC Group. We learn:
“One of the red flags that traditionally identified spam, including phishing attempts, was poor spelling and syntax, but the use of generative AI has changed that by taking humans out of the loop. … AI has also widened the geographical scope of spam and phishing. When humans were the primary crafters of such content, the crooks stuck to common languages to target the largest audience with the least amount of work. But, Wisniewski explained, AI makes it much easier to craft emails in different languages.”
For example, residents of Quebec used to spot spam by its use of European French instead of the Québécois dialect. Similarly, folks in Portugal learned to dismiss messages written in Brazilian Portuguese. Now, though, AI makes it easy to replicate regional dialects. Perhaps more eerily, it also make it easier to replicate human empathy. Thomson writes:
“AI chatbots have proven highly effective at seducing victims into thinking they are being wooed by an attractive partner, at least during the initial phases. Wisniewski said that AI chatbots can easily handle the opening phases of the scams, registering interest and appearing to be empathetic. Then a human operator takes over and begins removing funds from the mark by asking for financial help, or encouraging them to invest in Ponzi schemes.”
Great. To make matters worse, much of this is now taking place with realistic audio fakes. For example:
“Scammers might call everybody on the support team with an AI-generated voice that duplicates somebody in the IT department, asking for a password until one victim succumbs.”
Chances are good someone eventually will. Whether video bots are a threat (yet) is up for debate. Wisniewski, for one, believes convincing, real-time video deepfakes are not quite there. But Brown reports the experienced pros at his firm have successfully created them for specific use cases. Both believe it is only a matter of time before video deepfakes become not only possible but easy to create and deploy. It seems we must soon learn to approach every interaction that is not in-person with great vigilance and suspicion. How refreshing.
Cynthia Murrell, May 22, 2025
Stolen iPhone Building: Just One Building?
May 21, 2025
Just the dinobaby operating without Copilot or its ilk.
I am not too familiar with the outfits which make hardware and software to access mobile phones. I have heard that these gizmos exist and work. Years ago I learned that some companies — well, one company lo those many years ago — could send a text message to a mobile phone and gain access to the device. I have heard that accessing iPhones and some Androids is a tedious business. I have heard that some firms manufacture specialized data retention computers to support the work required to access certain actors’ devices.
So what?
And what happens? The weird orange newspaper published “Inside China’s Stolen iPhone Building.” The write up is from a “real news” outfit, the Financial Times. The story — if dead accurate — may be a reminder that cyber security has been gifted with another hole in its predictive, forward-leaning capabilities.
The write up explains how phones are broken down, parts sold, or (if unlocked) resold. But there is one passage in the write up which hip hops over what may be the “real” story. Here’s the passage:
Li [a Financial Times’ named source Kevin Li, who is an iPhone seller] insisted there was no way for phone sellers to force their way into passcode-locked devices. But posts on western social media show that many who have their phones stolen receive messages from individuals in Shenzhen either cajoling them or threatening them to remotely wipe their devices and remove them from the FindMy app. “For devices that have IDs, there aren’t that many places that have demand for them,” says Li, finishing his cigarette break. “In Shenzhen, there is demand . . . it’s a massive market.”
With the pool of engineering and practical technical talent, is it possible that this “market” in China houses organizations or individuals who can:
- Modify an unlocked phone so that it can operate as a node in a larger network?
- Use software — possibly similar to that developed by NSO Group-type entities — to compromise mobile devices. Then these devices are not resold if they contain high-value information. The “customer” could be a third party like an intelligence technology firm or to a government entity in a list of known buyers?
- Use devices which emulate the functions of certain intelware-centric companies to extract information and further industrialize the process of returning a used mobile to an “as new” condition.
Are these questions ones of interest to the readership of the Financial Times in the British government and its allies? Could the Financial Times ignore the mundane refurbishment market and focus on the “massive market” for devices that are not supposed to be unlocked?
Answer: Nope. Write about what could be said about refurbing iPads, electric bicycles, or smart microwaves. The key paragraph reveals that that building in China is probably one which could shed some light on what is an important business. If specialized hardware and software exist in the US and Western Europe, there is a reasonable chance that similar capabilities are available in the “iPhone building.” That’s a possible “real” story.
Stephen E Arnold, May xx, 2025
Scamming: An Innovation Driver
May 19, 2025
Readers who caught the 2022 documentary “The Tinder Swindler” will recognize Pernilla Sjöholm as one of that conman’s marks. Since the film aired, Sjöholm has co-developed a tool to fend off such fraudsters. The Next Web reports, “Tinder Swindler Survivor Launches Identity Verifier to Fight Scams.” The platform, cofounded with developer Suejb Memeti, is called IDfier. Writer Thomas Macaulay writes:
“The platform promises a simple yet secure way to check who you’re interacting with. Users verify themselves by first scanning their passport, driver’s license, or ID card with their phone camera. If the document has an NFC (near-field communication), IDfier will also scan the chip for additional security. The user then completes a quick head movement to prove they’re a real person — rather than a photo, video, or deepfake. Once verified, they can send other people a request to do the same. Both of them can then choose which information to share, from their name and age to their contact number. All their data is encrypted and stored across disparate servers. IDfier was built to blend this security with precision. According to the platform, the tech is 99.9% accurate in detecting real users and blocking impersonation attempts. The team envisions the system securing endless online services, from e-commerce and email to social media and, of course, dating apps such as Tinder.”
For those who have not viewed the movie: In 2018 Sjöholm and Simon Leviev met on Tinder and formed what she thought was a close, in-person relationship. But Simon was not the Leviev he pretended to be. In the end, he cheated her out of tens of thousands of euros with a bogus sob story.
It is not just fellow humans’ savings Sjöholm aims to protect, but also our hearts. She emphasizes such tactics amount to emotional abuse as well as fraud. The trauma of betrayal is compounded by a common third-party reaction—many observers shame victims as stupid or incautious. Sjöholm figures that is because people want to believe it cannot happen to them. And it doesn’t. Until it does.
Since her ordeal, Sjöholm has been dismayed to see how convincing deepfakes have grown and how easy they now are to make. She is also appalled at how vulnerable our children are. Someday, she hopes to offer IDfier free for kids. We learn:
“Sjöholm’s plan partly stems from her experience giving talks in schools. She recalls one in which she asked the students how many of them interacted with strangers online. ‘Ninety-five percent of these kids raised their hands,’ she said. ‘And you could just see the teacher’s face drop. It’s a really scary situation.’”
We agree. Sjöholm states that between fifty and sixty percent of scams involve fake identities. And, according to The Global Anti-Scam Alliance, scams collectively rake in more than $1 trillion (with a “t”) annually. Romance fraud alone accounts for several billion dollars, according to the World Economic Forum. At just $2 per month, IDfier seems like a worthwhile precaution for those who engage with others online.
Cynthia Murrell, May 19, 2025
Retail Fraud Should Be Spelled RetAIl Fraud
May 16, 2025
As brick-and-mortar stores approach extinction and nearly all shopping migrates to the Web, AI introduces new vulnerabilities to the marketplace. Shocking, we know. Cyber Security Intelligence reports, “ChatGPT’s Image Generation Could Be Driving Retail Fraud.” We learn:
“The latest AI image generators can create images that look like real photographs as well as imagery from simple text prompts with incredible accuracy. It can reproduce documents with precisely matching formatting, official logos, accurate timestamps, and even realistic barcodes or QR codes. In the hands of fraudsters, these tools can be used to commit ‘return fraud’ by creating convincing fake receipts and proof-of-purchase documentation.”
But wait, there is more. The post continues:
“Fake proof of purchase documentation can be used to claim warranty service for products that are out of warranty or purchased through unauthorised channels. Fraudsters could also generate fake receipts showing purchases at higher values than was actually paid for – then requesting refunds to gift cards for the inflated amount. Internal threats also exist too, as employees can create fake expense receipts for reimbursement. This is particularly damaging for businesses with less sophisticated verification processes in place. Perhaps the scenario most concerning of all is that these tools can enable scammers to generate convincing payment confirmations or shipping notices as part of larger social engineering attacks.”
Also of concern is the increased inconvenience to customers as sites beef up their verification processes. After all, the write-up notes, The National Retail Federation found 70% of customers say a positive return experience makes them more likely to revisit a seller.
So what is a retail site to do? Well, author Doriel Abrahams is part of Forter, a company that uses AI to protect online sellers from fraud. Naturally, he suggests using a platform like his firm’s to find suspicious patterns without hindering legit customers too much. Is more AI the solution? We are not certain. If one were to go down that route, though, one should probably compare multiple options.
Cynthia Murrell, May 16, 2025
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