A WIRED investigation reveals that criminals who make billions from scam compounds in Myanmar—where tens of thousands of people are enslaved—are using Starlink to get online.

Breeze Liu has been a prominent advocate for victims. But even she struggled to scrub nonconsensual intimate images and videos of herself from the web.

Plus: Researchers find RedNote lacks basic security measures, surveillance ramps up around the US-Mexico border, and the UK ordering Apple to create an encryption backdoor comes under fire.

Romance scams cost victims hundreds of millions of dollars a year. As people grow increasingly isolated, and generative AI helps scammers scale their crimes, the problem could get worse.

Services supporting victims of online child exploitation and trafficking around the world have faced USAID and State Department cuts—and children are suffering as a result, sources tell WIRED.

The dismantling of USAID by Elon Musk's DOGE and a State Department funding freeze have severely disrupted efforts to help people escape forced labor camps run by criminal scammers.

Security researchers tested 50 well-known jailbreaks against DeepSeek’s popular new AI chatbot. It didn’t stop a single one.

China-based DeepSeek has exploded in popularity, drawing greater scrutiny. Case in point: Security researchers found more than 1 million records, including user data and API keys, in an open database.

Amid ongoing fears over TikTok, Chinese generative AI platform DeepSeek says it’s sending heaps of US user data straight to its home country, potentially setting the stage for greater scrutiny.

“Yahoo Boy” scammers are impersonating CNN and other news organizations to create videos that pressure victims into making blackmail payments.

TikTok is now unavailable in the United States—and getting around the ban isn’t as simple as using a VPN. Here’s what you need to know.

Huione Guarantee, a gray market researchers believe is central to the online scam ecosystem, now includes a messaging app, stablecoin, and crypto exchange—while facilitating $24 billion in transactions.

The fate of TikTok now rests in the hands of the US Supreme Court. If a law banning the social video app this month is upheld, it won’t disappear from your phone—but it will get messy fast.

In just 20 minutes this morning, an automated license-plate-recognition (ALPR) system in Nashville, Tennessee, captured photographs and detailed information from nearly 1,000 vehicles as they passed by. Among them: eight black Jeep Wranglers, six Honda Accords, an ambulance, and a yellow Ford Fiesta with a vanity plate.

This trove of real-time vehicle data, collected by one of Motorola’s ALPR systems, is meant to be accessible by law enforcement. However, a flaw discovered by a security researcher has exposed live video feeds and detailed records of passing vehicles, revealing the staggering scale of surveillance enabled by this widespread technology.

More than 150 Motorola ALPR cameras have exposed their video feeds and leaking data in recent months, according to security researcher Matt Brown, who first publicized the issues in a series of YouTube videos after buying an ALPR camera on eBay and reverse engineering it.

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Misconfigured license-plate-recognition systems reveal the livestreams of individual cameras and the wealth of data they collect about every vehicle that passes by them.

Smartphones and face recognition are being combined to create new digital travel documents. The paper passport’s days are numbered—despite new privacy risks.

AI voice cloning and deepfakes are supercharging scams. One method to protect your loved ones and yourself is to create secret code words to verify someone’s identity in real time.

Plus: Google’s U-turn on creepy “fingerprint” tracking, the LockBit ransomware gang’s teased comeback, and a potential US ban on the most popular routers in America.

In the hit virtual reality game Gorilla Tag, you swing your arms to pull your primate character around—clambering through virtual worlds, climbing up trees and, above all, trying to avoid an infectious mob of other gamers. If you’re caught, you join the horde. However, some kids playing the game claim to have found a way to cheat and easily “tag” opponents.

Over the past year, teenagers have produced video tutorials showing how to side-load a virtual private network (VPN) onto Meta’s virtual reality headsets and use the location-changing technology to get ahead in the game. Using a VPN, according to the tutorials, introduces a delay that makes it easier to sneak up and tag other players.

While the workaround is likely to be an annoying but relatively harmless bit of in-game cheating, there’s a catch. The free VPN app that the video tutorials point to, Big Mama VPN, is also selling access to its users’ home internet connections—with buyers essentially piggybacking on the VR headset’s IP address to hide their own online activity.

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A free VPN app called Big Mama is selling access to people’s home internet networks. Kids are using it to cheat in a VR game while researchers warn of bigger security risks.