Exposure online: the internet, social media, communities, shopping, online finance and digital services.
A comparison of 200 romance fraud victims with 10,723 people who were never scammed found victims middle-aged and better educated, with self-rated security knowledge predicting nothing. The current version of the fraud asks for an investment rather than a favour, stepping between the two standard warnings.
Randomised experiments show manipulative interface design nearly quadrupling acceptance of an unchanged offer, while raising its price fourfold changed nothing. What works, what is overstated, and why enforcement rather than vigilance is what altered the interfaces.
The composition and expiry rules came from one 2003 appendix, and its author regrets it. What actually takes over accounts is reuse, infostealers and phishable codes.
The FBI warned in May 2025 that end-of-life home routers are being taken over for criminal proxy networks, using malware that needs no password. What attackers actually want is your residential IP address. The eight settings that matter, why the guest network is the highest-value free change, and the backup rule that is the only answer to ransomware.
Four known places-and-times identify 95% of people in an anonymised mobility dataset, and coarsening the data barely helps. How real-time bidding broadcasts your location to bidders who keep it even when they lose, what the FTC found inside Mobilewalla and X-Mode, and which defences actually work – including the deletion platform California switched on this month.
Seventy-six per cent of identity theft involves an account you already have, and a credit freeze does not touch that category. What a freeze actually blocks, how fast the bureaus must act by law, the difference between a freeze, a lock and a fraud alert, and what covers the other three quarters.
The FBI logged its first AI-fraud category in 2025: 22,364 complaints and $893 million. A few seconds of public audio is enough to clone a voice. The scam has one shape, one tell, and one free defence that defeats all of it.
US fraud losses hit $16 billion in 2025. The six-digit code texted to your phone can be relayed by a fake page in real time — and CISA ranks it last. What phishing-resistant authentication does differently, and the two free steps that matter most.
