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Long Island resident Agostine Abbatiello allegedly forced frat brothers to join his coke-peddling operation by calling in debts.

A key Telemundo executive was one of seven helicopter passengers killed in a fiery crash near the foothills of a mountain in northern Kenya on Wednesday.

200,000 Fake AI 'Victims' Deployed To Scam-Bait Online Fraudsters

Authored by Andrew Fenton via CoinTelegraph.com,

Australian tech firm Apate deploys a vast array of AI-bot characters worldwide that play the role of gullible scam victims to waste millions of hours of con artists’ time each month.

Hilariously, one of the company’s monthly performance metrics is how many times frustrated scammers swear at the idiot ‘victims’ who are playing dumb and stringing them along.

“I think we’re the only company in the world that is actually keeping as part of their KPIs the number of F-words that scammers are dropping at them,” Apate founder Dali Kaafar tells Magazine with a chuckle. 

The company has a stable of almost 200,000 AI characters that are able to hold convincing phone conversations and to chat on social media and messaging platforms.

”I can tell you that we’re basically servicing, as we call them, hundreds of thousands of calls a day, and pretty much hundreds of thousands of conversations on the other channels,” he says. 

Every hour of a con artist’s time they waste is another hour they’re not scamming a member of the public. In the six weeks up to the end of 2025, Apate’s bots engaged in 600,000 scam calls for a single telco called TPG in Australia. 

“Essentially, we wasted more than five hundred days of scammers’ time,” he explains. “That roughly equates to somewhere around thirteen million dollars being saved.”

The bots’ other goal is to elicit actionable intelligence for banks and telcos to combat scam rings across Australia, Asia, Africa and the UK and Europe.

Apate bots deal with scammers via chat. Source: Apate

Scam baiting at scale with AI victims

Kaafar says he got the idea when he received a scam call while having a picnic with his family in Sydney back in November 2021.

To his wife’s annoyance, but his kids’ delight, he strung the scammer along for 44 minutes by pretending to be a gullible rube falling for the scam. 

“What followed was really literally a full comedy show for my kids,” he says, adding that during the call he’d also learned a lot of potentially useful information about the mechanics of the scam and the tactics used.   

“As I hung up that call, I remember thinking very clearly: if I could do that just for fun, imagine what technology can do at scale.”

Working as a professor at Macquarie University at the time, he raised the idea with some of his doctoral students working on AI and security.

“I said, ‘Guys, there has to be a much better way of doing this. Let’s build something that is really automating this whole process of engaging scammers at scale, but also, perhaps most importantly, extracting all sorts of intelligence from these conversations.’ And that’s literally how it started.”

Within a few months they’d secured funding from the Office of National Intelligence to research the idea, and the project was spun off from the university into Apate in 2023. The company now works with most of the big banks in Australia, as well as numerous banks in the UK, South Africa and South East Asia. 

Apate is far from the only company scam baiting fraudsters using AI bots — though they are doing it on a greater scale than most. United Kingdom telco O2 rolled out an AI Granny campaign last year, which frustrates scammers by taking up hours of their time talking about her 28 cats. It was as much an ad campaign to warn the public about the dangers of scam calls as anything else.

O2’s highly entertaining AI Granny. Source: 02

Creating the perfect AI victims

Apate launched with 120 different personas across different genders, ages and personality types, and now have 197,000 personas with identifiable vocal tics, accents, and they make the same noises people make when they’re trying to think of what to say. 

“We spent a lot of time refining and building these AI bots that sound exactly like you and I and our neighbors,” he says. 

The AI models were trained on “hundreds and hundreds” of hours of recorded conversations between human scam baiters and scammers, so they can employ counter strategies.

“They know that they’re talking to bad guys, if you like, and they really navigate the conversations so that it sounds really very, very realistic to any scammer out there, even if a scammer is skeptical about things.”The bots get sent out on WhatsApp and Telegram to act as honeypots for scammers. While the old cliché that you can’t scam an honest man is not true, it’s still very possible to exploit the scammer’s desire for money. 

“They are cybercriminals, really. I think we just very often forget that they’re cybercriminals who are trying to get people’s life savings. And so that element of greed is sometimes what our bots also exploit.”

Bots collect valuable intel from each scam call

In the crypto industry, Apate works for “one of the leaders in blockchain analysis,” which may or may not be Chainalysis. They aren’t interested in wasting scammers’ time — they want intelligence on which wallets and methods scammers are using so they can track the flow of funds. 

“These bots, as they engage across different conversations, extract new crypto wallet addresses by the hundreds and by the thousands,” he says. “It’s data and intelligence that is coming literally before their damage happens.”

Scamming is big business, and the call centers are “pretty much corporate organizations,” Kaafar explains. 

“This data is very, very important because, literally, that’s the new account or the new wallet where you really need to pay extreme attention to. Because this is where these… scammer compounds are collecting their money or their funds with.”

“Think about it literally as being always ahead of the scammer’s tactics. And the more you know before the money gets transferred, the better it is.”

In July, Apate’s bots uncovered a marketplace for brokers soliciting verified bank accounts in India, offering commissions of up to 5% paid in USDT on the proceeds from scams passing through the accounts.

Apate’s human staff in Sydney. Source: Apate

AI arms race between good guys and bad guys

Scammers are increasingly using AI bots themselves, and it won’t be too long before AI scammers are as ubiquitous as spam emails. Scamming people is a $1.24 trillion business, so the industry can afford the compute required to scale up operations.
Apate’s research suggests that about 20% to 30% of scam text conversations employ AI already, but Kaafar isn’t too worried about the outcome of anti-scam bots fighting scam bots.
He says their researchers believe that AI bots playing defense have an advantage, according to game theory, because they’re trying to extract intelligence, while the scam bots are trying to get the other AI to perform an action.

“You can also demonstrate mathematically that that is to the advantage of a defender because it becomes easier to extract intelligence from the attacker’s AI model,” he says.

“We can imagine a world where scammers become a lot more sophisticated and deploy such technology. But that also means that if they do, they’re actually deemed to lose the game, which is great news in the fight against scams.” Tyler Durden Wed, 08/19/2026 - 15:05

Tell the AI to do it.

The "Next Gen NYC" star is headed to the Caribbean — but not without sharing her travel must-haves with us.

The "Next Gen NYC" star is headed to the Caribbean — but not without sharing her travel must-haves with us.

A major grocery store has closed down eight locations in California.

BALTIMORE — The comparisons have been there for a while, and certainly since George Lombard Jr. made his debut with the Yankees earlier this month. At shortstop, he can make plays up the middle and deep in the hole to his right, as Lombard did in Tuesday’s win over the Orioles, when he took a...

Kalshi promo code NYPMAX unlocks an exclusive trade $25, get up to $500 in bonuses offer.

The Pogues are hanging up their flip-flops for the last time.

The billionaire developer is calling on Ralphs, Gelson’s and other businesses to return, pointing to strong sales and a nearly full Palisades Village as signs of demand.

Mariska Hargitay still has Knicks fever.

Shawn Estes still believes it should have been someone else.

Nneka Ogwumike is walking away from the WNBA while she remains one of its best players. The Los Angeles Sparks superstar announced Wednesday that she will retire at the conclusion of the 2026 season, ending an extraordinary 15-year career that included a championship, an MVP award and nearly a decade leading the players’ union. Ogwumike...

"William didn’t gang bang. He did well in school and he had a loving family.”

Media Accuses Hegseth Of Covering Up USS Lincoln Supply Crisis

The scandal and controversy over the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier continues, despite the Trump administration and top military brass reiterating this week that the issues have been hugely overblown. It's long been reported that the supercarrier which is front line in the war against Iran has suffered resupply problems, low morale, sub-standard conditions, and mental health problems given the over-extended deployment.

One prominent media outlet is now alleging that the crisis is largely due to War Secretary Pete Hegseth having "hid" a crucial piece of information - that amid Iran's retaliation during Operation Epic Fury, it had destroyed much of the main resupply base for the US Central Command region (CENTCOM).

via Stars & Stripes

MS Now senior national security reporter David Rohde made the claim, saying that when the logistics hub Naval Support Activity (NSA) Bahrain was struck by Iranian ballistic missiles at the start of the war, it effectively crippled Pentagon resupply and logistics for the Mideast region.

According to MS Now's reporting:

During a segment in MS Now discussing President Donald Trump's dismissal of reports of low morale and the mental health concerns of those aboard the carrier during an unusually long deployment, Rohde said the resupply issue was "because Pete Hegseth hid the fact that Iran destroyed the main resupply base that the United States has in the Gulf."

"He did not make that public in press conference after press conference, and that is, again, the way that they have mishandled this war," Rohde added. The full segment can be viewed here.

As a reminder, at the end of June the Wall Street Journal featured several satellite images which demonstrated the widespread destruction at the base. From there, the Pentagon was forced to only maintain a small staff there, and is said to be mulling abandoning it as an operations center altogether.

"When the Iranian missiles and drones came for the nerve center of America’s naval operations in the Middle East, some of them hit their mark," that prior WSJ reporting indicated. According to more:

The U.S. Navy base in Bahrain was repeatedly targeted between late February and June. Strikes that got through caused extensive damage, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of satellite imagery, social-media footage and interviews with current and former servicemembers—damage that the Pentagon hasn’t publicly acknowledged. Hit hard were the command headquarters and at least a dozen other buildings, along with two satellite communications terminals. 

The military said no one was killed at the base, known as Naval Support Activity Bahrain, and that the strikes didn’t significantly impact operations. The U.S. evacuated most personnel but has kept a small staff on the ground. 

,,,The extensive damage done to America’s sole naval base in the Middle East—along with hits to at least 20 U.S. sites across the region, including military installations and diplomatic facilities—has the U.S. re-evaluating its entire footprint in the region, according to U.S. officials familiar with the deliberations.

All of this reportedly had significant impact on the USS Lincoln's ability to maintain standard supplies and conditions. Again, all of this is being downplayed or else outright denied by the Pentagon and US administration. 

Media headlines focused on the Lincoln have been growing over the summer...

We will quote one unnamed former national security insider who has offered the following...

"Bahrain NSA was critical to keeping carriers on station because it provided nearby supplies and you can't put the carriers in at ports within missile range of Iran as they will become sitting ducks (and sabotage targets). Bahrain NSA was a soft target (I've been there), and questions should be raised about why it wasn't hardened if we were going to use military force against Iran. Iran could not destroy a carrier so it did the next best thing and destroyed its logistics."

Tyler Durden Wed, 08/19/2026 - 14:45

Here Comes QE Lite: Yields, Dollar Tumble, Gold Spikes After Treasury Unexpectedly Doubles Size Of Long-End Treasury Buybacks

Over the past several years, one of the more amusing debates gripping the market's Fed-watchers was whether the Fed's treasury buyback auctions were a form of soft QE, with this website consistently arguing that - contrary to what washed out ex-Bridgewater traders with a newsletter to sell may tell you - Treasury buybacks were just that when it comes to what matters such as market reaction, to wit:

*TREASURY SAYS IT'S EVALUATING ENHANCEMENTS TO BUYBACK PROGRAM

"Not QE"

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 30, 2025

*TREASURY INCREASES LIQUIDITY BUYBACK TOTAL TO $30B FROM $15B

"Not QE 2.0" is growing

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 31, 2024

TREASURY DEBT BUYBACK TARGETS COUPONS MATURING IN 2031 - 2034

Next QE rehearsal

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 24, 2024

And moments ago, Scott Bessent finally resolved the debate when, with 30Y yields at 20 year highs and threatening to blow out higher, the US Treasury shocked markets, sparked a meltdown in yields and surge in equity futures and gold when it announced at 8:30am that they will be "increasing, by at least double, the size of liquidity support buyback operations for longer-dated nominal coupon securities (the 10-year to 20-year sector and the 20-year to 30-year sector). The current maximum size of $2 billion per operation will be at least $4 billion per operation."

This change will be effective September 9, 2026 and will be in effect for the remainder of this refunding quarter (through November 4, 2026). The releases noted that the Treasury will provide more information about future buyback sizes at the next Quarterly Refunding, scheduled for November 4, 2026, in other words it has the benefit of 3 months of "NOT QE" without having to even specify its thinking.

According to the statement, "this increase in buyback operation sizes reflects Treasury’s desire to provide greater liquidity support in longer-dated nominal sectors where there is consistent strong sponsorship from market participants, as evidenced by the significant volume of high-quality offers Treasury routinely receives in longer-dated buyback operations."

Translation: Bessent panicked and the justification that there is no liquidity is just a strawman, with the Treasury now freaking out that the demand for AI paper is crowding out demand for Treasuries as we have been warning for the past several weeks, and as we predicted a week ago when looking at the blowing out Treasury skew, "Bessent will be busy.:"

Bessent will be busy https://t.co/0BslbpgnLs pic.twitter.com/kreaTPS1rh

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 11, 2026

It took just one week for him to show just how busy he would be.

The market reaction was instant and violent, with 30y yields down 6bps in an instant on the headlines, having been down 2bp prior,  This brings Wednesday's yield decline to 8bp total

US 2s30s is 7bp flatter on the day and 10s30s 2bp flatter.

Naturally, with Bessent panicking, stock futures surged...

... but more importantly, gold is breaking out bigly....

... as the market realizes that with total US debt about to hit $40 trillion...

so close.... pic.twitter.com/edFs1kzVZB

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 18, 2026

... it all gets much worse from here. 

Tyler Durden Wed, 08/19/2026 - 14:40

Texas Hits New Peak Demand Record, Faces 80% Supply Shortfall By 2030

By Marlene Wilden of UtilityDive

• Peak demand in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas territory could reach 120 GW by 2030 – incredible growth of more than 30% above the new, unofficial all-time peak reached on July 22, but notably lower than ERCOT’s own forecasts, according to a market report from Ascend Analytics that was provided to Utility Dive.
• The firm cites gas turbine shortages, multi-year development timelines and interconnection bottlenecks as limiting factors preventing enough new generation from coming online to serve proposed large loads. 
• Ascend says ERCOT’s energy-only market no longer provides enough revenue certainty to finance the dispatchable generation needed to meet future demand, while persistent gaps between forward markets and actual outcomes weaken the market signals used to guide investment decisions. 

ERCOT’s large-load queue has grown by more than 200 GW since 2024, driven largely by data centers, manufacturing, cryptocurrency and industrial oil and gas development, but uncertainty remains over how much load can be safely interconnected. 

The grid operator said in April that the total 2030 load reported by transmission service providers, based on contracts and officer letters, was 208 GW. ERCOT’s adjusted load forecast put it at 138 GW.

Ascend’s estimate of 120 GW assumes delays and a 55.4% success rate for proposed loads. The firm says delays in energization and large-load attrition are making it increasingly difficult to forecast how much demand will actually materialize on ERCOT’s grid.

“Even though that appetite is enormous, if it can’t get met, it’s not coming online,” Brent Nelson, senior managing director of market intelligence at Ascend, told Utility Dive in an interview.

“The ability of the grid to add new generation is much, much smaller than the demand of queued large-load facilities,” Robert LaFaso, Ascend’s director of market intelligence, told Utility Dive. 

Both executives identified generation availability as the primary constraint. 

Nelson said some transmission challenges can be mitigated by co-locating generation and load. Developers face significant supply chain hurdles in adding those resources, particularly dispatchable plants, according to Ascend.

Ascend cites the limited number of tier-one gas turbine manufacturers as a key factor contributing to project attrition among Texas Energy Fund applicants. The firm also identifies engineering, procurement and construction capacity, high-voltage equipment and permitting as growing bottlenecks to building new generation. 

Ascend expects ERCOT’s reserve margins will remain healthy through 2026 before tightening as load growth outpaces supply additions. That shift is prompting discussion of potential market reforms, including concepts such as a “bring-your-own-new-generation” requirement for large loads. 

Nelson said such a structure could help align new demand with new supply but warned it could undermine the economics of existing merchant generators and increase policy uncertainty for investors.

For storage, the challenge is squarely financial.

“We’ve seen pullbacks from a lot of the lenders expressing drastic concerns over the past several years, where [storage projects] have not met revenue expectations, and the lending community is starting to question whether or not merchant storage is investable without firmer revenue,” LaFaso said. 

Lenders increasingly require contracted revenues rather than relying on merchant market returns, he said. Those financing challenges are compounded by ERCOT’s energy-only market design, which relies on scarcity pricing to incentivize new generation.

Scarcity revenues alone are unlikely to support investment, particularly as developers face rising costs for natural gas equipment and other infrastructure. The problem, Nelson warned, is that there are only two realistic outcomes under that structure: Either scarcity pricing fails to provide enough revenue to support new entry — leaving the system short of dispatchable capacity — or it succeeds in doing so but creates an affordability crisis by forcing consumers to pay high, volatile prices to the entire supply stack.  

The firm also said a changing generation mix could make scarcity revenues more weather- and outage-dependent, adding volatility for generators and complicating financing. It identified September as an emerging risk period due to reduced solar output from earlier sunsets and lower evening wind generation than in August. 

Ascend expects wholesale prices to rise in the near term as demand grows before stabilizing over the longer term as additional renewable generation comes online. Natural gas plants are still expected to set prices during evening ramping periods when solar output declines.

Tyler Durden Wed, 08/19/2026 - 14:25

A cyclist was killed when a pick-up truck driver rammed into her in Brooklyn Tuesday, hurling her from her bike and running over her body -- before fleeing, authorities said.

FOMC Minutes Tilt Hawkish: 'Inflation Risks Skewed To The Upside' Due To AI

While today's market moves (post-Bessent's OpTwist bailout) are changing things rapidly, since the last FOMC meeting, on July 19th, where Warsh held rates (hawkishly) unchanged (in the biggest surprise to market expectations in decades) amid multiple dissents, gold, bitcoin, and oil have outperformed, the dollar and bonds have lagged, with stocks solidly green in the middle...

And rate-hike expectations have plunged, erasing the hawkish shift since Warsh's first Fed meeting (thanks mostly to weak macro since the meeting)...

With Fed-watchers up in arms about him not giving the book away (ending forward guidance), they are hoping for some signs on the tea-leaves today of The Fed's reaction function (don't hold your breath) or what they are watching (still don't hold your breath).

Market participants expected the Minutes to show that hawkish sentiment on the committee was broad-based, despite the decision to hold rates steady. That could re-energize market bets on an imminent rate hike, bets that have subsided since July’s weak jobs and retail-sales data and modest CPI inflation.

However, bear in mind that the FOMC minutes are backward-looking, of course, but the editorial process – which requires sign-off from top officials – allows the Fed to selectively underscore certain messages. Given the sharp upward movement in long-term bond yields recently (before today) and concerns about Fed credibility, many are expecting officials likely to give the minutes a hawkish edit.

So what do Warsh and his new pals at The Eccles Building want us to know?

As expected, a hawkish tilt to the Minutes:

As we already knew, the members were mixed:

• Most participants assessed higher rates would likely be necessary if inflation did not fall; 

• “Many participants assessed that policy tightening would likely be necessary if inflation did not decline,” the minutes said.

• Most participants at Fed's July 28-29 meeting supported keeping interest rates unchanged, but several favored an increase

• Various participants said tighter financial conditions over intermeeting period reflected strong economic growth and expectations for Fed to adopt more restrictive stance before long

• A few of the participants who favored raising rates at the meeting judged doing so would likely help forestall need for further hikes

Fewer meetings possible:

The minutes also showed Warsh raised the idea of reducing the committee’s annual number of policy meetings from eight to six.

“The Chairman observed that six scheduled meetings per year, held roughly every two months, would allow more information to accumulate between meetings than under current practice and provide policymakers and the staff more time to consider strategic monetary policy issues,” the minutes said.

Warsh then asked for input from the committee on the idea. The minutes made clear the number of meetings would not be adjusted this year. A reduction in the number of policy meetings would mark a significant shift in the way the central bank operates.

It was all about inflation:

“Most participants anticipated that inflation would step down over the rest of the year as the effects of tariffs and earlier energy price increases wane, but many participants noted the possibility that inflation might be more persistently elevated,” the minutes said.

• Fed staff economic outlook showed inflation outlook was similar to one prepared for June meeting but economic outlook was 'a touch weaker'

• *FED: PARTICIPANTS JUDGED INFLATION RISKS WERE SKEWED TO UPSIDE

• *FED: SEVERAL SAW AI INVESTMENT HAVING BROADER EFFECT ON PRICES

• *FED: SEVERAL SAID TARIFF PASS-THROUGH WAS NOW LARGELY COMPLETE

• Several participants noted price increases over last year were broad based, spanning various categories of goods and services

• The record showed participants’ inflation outlooks were “highly uncertain” and the re-escalation of the Iran war “clouded the inflation outlook.”

Labor:

• Officials described the labor market as stable, with labor demand and supply in balance.

Balance Sheet

• A couple of participants noted ample-reserves regime had helped maintain orderly market functioning during brief payments outage during intermeeting period.

Interestingly, in line with his lack of forward guidance (and the potential for fewer meetings), the Minutes appeared more sparse of actionable detail than usual.

Read the full Minutes here.

 

Tyler Durden Wed, 08/19/2026 - 14:05