The scammers who have been bombarding American smartphones with fake messages about packages and toll-road fines have pivoted to impersonating the phone companies.

Fraudsters Are Posing as Trusted Authorities We have seen a growing number of scams targeting individuals by pretending to come from institutions people are naturally inclined to trust: the IRS, the FTC, Social Security, Medicare, the DMV, law enforcement, and even...

Do you find it exhausting to combat the increasing number of fraud scams lurking in your email inbox? You are not alone. Sophisticated AI-enabled organizations are becoming cleverer by the day. Many of us don’t notice threats, because some messages seemingly are coming from people we know—until we click on the latest creative scam—like a party invitation. Yeah, I did.

In 2023, the global prompt-engineering market was valued at $222.1 million and projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.8% from 2024–30. In early 2025, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said that “the prompting tricks that many people used in 2023 are no longer relevant, and some of them will never be needed again.” Were we too quick to predict prompt-engineering a great future? And if not prompting, what is the most valuable skill in the age of AI?

Zak Doffman writes about security, surveillance and privacy.

Republished on May 29 with a new report into increasing mobile attacks, and further agency and even a new Google warning into this surging threat.