Tag Archives: Deception

The Evolution of Digital Deception: How 2025 Scams Blended into Daily Online Life

Jan. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The Q4 2025 Gen Threat Report highlights a significant shift in cybercrime, where fraudulent advertisements and deepfake content have become the primary methods for targeting consumers. These findings indicate that attackers are increasingly exploiting trusted social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube to host fake online shops and deceptive investment schemes. Rather than using complex technical exploits, modern scams trick individuals into performing routine digital actions, such as clicking links or scanning QR codes, to compromise their data. The report also identifies GhostPairing attacks and a sharp rise in identity-related breaches as growing risks that bridge the gap between mobile and desktop devices. Ultimately, the data warns that malvertising has evolved into a sophisticated tool that allows threats to blend seamlessly into everyday internet browsing. Continue reading

02Dec/25

Fraud’s New Frontier: AI, Deepfakes, and Global Networks

Dec. 02, 2025 /Mpelembe Media/ — The Sumsub Fraud Report 2025-2026 focuses on the “Sophistication Shift,” which describes the fundamental change in identity fraud from high-volume, basic attempts to fewer, more targeted, and financially damaging AI-enabled operations. This shift is driven primarily by the industrialisation of deception via generative AI, leading to an explosion in deepfakes and highly realistic synthetic identities across all major digital ecosystems. The analysis provides comprehensive regional breakdowns for Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Africa, and North America, demonstrating that even in markets where overall fraud rates are stabilising, the remaining attacks are significantly more complex and harder to detect. Continue reading

03May/25

Perfect storm of tech bros, foreign interference and disinformation is an urgent threat to press freedom

Tom Felle, University of Galway

Media freedom has long been essential to healthy democracy. It is the oxygen that fuels informed debate, exposes corruption and holds power to account. But around the world, that freedom is under sustained attack.

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23Nov/24

Parents lie to children all the time – but they should think twice about it

Rebecca Brown, University of Oxford

Parents frequently lie to their children. “No, you can’t have any chocolate – it’s all gone,” when there’s a jumbo bar of Dairy Milk in the cupboard. “No, you can’t have my phone to watch YouTube – the battery’s flat,” when it’s at a solid 65%.

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06Jan/24

Four tips for a healthy news diet in 2024, from an expert in media psychology

Sharon Coen, University of Salford

The start of the new year brings inevitable pressure to start fresh, with new hobbies, exercise regimes and healthy diets. But there is one diet you may not have thought of improving this year: your media and news consumption.

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02Jan/24

2024: The year of democratic elections

Jan. 2, 2024 /Politics/ — 2024 is shaping up to be a bumper year for elections! Here are some noteworthy examples beyond the UK and USA: Continue reading

26Sep/23

Donald Trump’s truth: why liars might sometimes be considered honest – new research

Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol and Jana Lasser, Graz University of Technology

According to fact checkers, Donald Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency. That’s around 20 a day. But, according to several opinion polls during his presidency, around 75% of Republican voters still considered Trump to be honest.

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27Jul/23

Introducing Norton Genie – Real-Time AI-powered Scam Detection at Your Fingertips


Scams are one of the most pervasive Cyber Safety threats of our time. The sheer volume is staggering – people are collectively wading through 3.4 billion phishing emails on a daily basis – and scams are becoming more sophisticated and harder to spot without help. Today, Norton, a leader in Cyber Safety and part of Gen™ (NASDAQ: GEN), is inviting people to join in the fight against scams by offering early access to Norton Genie, a real-time AI-powered scam detector, to provide an easy, fast and free way to check if texts, emails, websites and social media posts are a scam. Continue reading

22Jun/23

How scammers use psychology to create some of the most convincing internet cons – and what to watch out for

Stacey Wood, Scripps College and Yaniv Hanoch, University of Southampton

Online fraud is today’s most common crime. Victims are often told they are foolish for falling for it, but fraudsters use psychological mechanisms to infiltrate the defences of their targets, regardless of how intelligent they are.

So it’s important to keep up with the latest scams and understand how they work.

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02May/23

Buzzfeed News: sad demise of a clever, innovative site that led the way in digital journalism

Sean Dodson, Leeds Beckett University

Buzzfeed News, once a shining star of digital journalism, has announced it will shut its award-winning news division for good, laying off about 60 journalists in a move its founding editor, Ben Smith, described as “the end of the marriage between social media and news”.

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