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Safiria Leccese is still struggling to accept that she's been caught in a scam. One of Mediaset's most popular female personalities appeared in a video shared online, offering an "easy" personal loan from her studio on Super Partes—the political analysis program on Canale 5 and Retequattro. One video was blocked, while another later appeared on her official social media, explaining the scam. Safiria explained that it wasn't her speaking, but an image of her created by artificial intelligence, and that she felt deeply hurt because so many people had already fallen for the deception created using technology. "We're all in a world of trouble, us and our children," she confessed to the weekly magazine Nuovo. "If politicians and multinationals don't take action, we need to make a digital ID mandatory to open any type of account, forcing people to declare their true identity. This would protect the very young, many adults, and the most vulnerable groups."

The journalist explained to the Cairo Editore weekly that she was able to uncover it thanks to a tip from a parliamentarian who is a frequent guest on the program. By following Super Partes's account, the internet automatically showed him the fake profile. They had stolen both my image and a frame of my broadcast, inventing a profile that falsely belonged to me to ask for money using a very simple system. Unfortunately, within an hour, several people had already fallen for the scam...

She said she felt mortified and immediately contacted the postal police, who immediately put some experts to work on her case. "The absurd thing is that they discovered two other fake profiles that were exploiting my image. They blocked everything, but unfortunately they haven't yet been able to identify the scammers." Now, what worries her most are the numbers surrounding the use of AI. "According to some research, almost half of young people between the ages of 15 and 19 use it as an emotional counselor. Let's not forget that some people have taken their own lives because they were advised to do so in a chat. There are remedies for money scams, but not for those that affect the lives of our children." It's no coincidence that at Super Partes "we often talk about young people's use of social media and artificial intelligence, and about proposed laws regarding both age restrictions and related software. And then there's the international situation and US President Donald Trump."

The owner of Facebook and Instagram faces a multi-billion pound group legal action from British consumers who accuse it of enabling scam adverts which left them facing financial ruin.

Social media platforms are estimated to have raked in more than £430million from UK users last year through hosting fraudulent adverts.

Victims are targeted by sophisticated algorithms which not only track their activity on the sites but also their broader internet use via cookies from third party websites.

As a result, someone searching for pension advice or looking to invest will be shown relevant adverts, some of which may be bogus.

To make matters worse, fraud victims who search online for how to recover some of the money they have lost are frequently scammed for a second time after unwittingly being directed to fake sites.

Just last month personal finance expert Martin Lewis said social media scam advertisements using his name and face to dupe unsuspecting consumers had become 'worse than ever'.

The Money Saving Expert website founder and consumer champions Which? wrote to the Prime Minister demanding urgent action against the plague of online fraud.

'Major online platforms are not just hosting criminal activity, they are actively profiting from it,' the letter stated.

Under the Online Safety Act, Meta has a legal, proactive duty to minimise harm on its platforms, or it can face a fine of ten per cent of its worldwide turnover, which in 2025 stood at $200billion.

But the letter accused ministers of giving platforms 'free rein to continue profiting from the financial and emotional harm scams cause to millions of victims every year'.

Now two law firms have joined forces in a bid to recoup some of the vast sums of money lost by British users of Facebook and Instagram from its owner, Meta.

The tech giant projected in 2024 that it would earn about 10 per cent of its overall annual revenue -- or $16 billion -- from running advertising for scams and banned goods, according to internal company documents obtained by Reuters.

Among those hoping for redress is Wayne Luxon, who lost £140,000 to a cryptocurrency scam after seeing a deepfake Martin Lewis video on Facebook.

The 43-year-old, from Taunton, Somerset, said he went to a 'dark place' after he was conned into investing into a fraudulent clone of legitimate platform.

'Facebook should be stopping these adverts straight away,' he said.

'It's not fair to the people that get conned into investing, and once you click on one advert there's another and another. They are constantly coming up on your feed.'

The legal claim is being launched by two specialist law firms, Humphries Kerstetter and Richardson Hartley Law.

An initial sign-up process found that the average loss per victim stands at around £37,000, often representing life savings accumulated over decades.

Martin Richardson, senior partner at Richardson Hartley Law, a firm that specialises in fraud said: 'Politicians are wary of taking on trillion-dollar corporations with armies of lawyers and lobbyists, and that reluctance has left victims without justice for too long.

'The people we represent are good, honest, intelligent individuals.

'They have lost their savings, their confidence, sometimes everything.

'The platform that put those adverts in front of them is making hundreds of millions of pounds a year from doing so.

'We have no choice but to fight for them.'

Mr Luxon's ordeal began in 2020 when he saw the video on Facebook which claimed he could earn extra income by investing as little as £250 into cryptocurrency.

The father-of-four said he believed the site was 'totally legitimate' after his initial payment doubled and he was able to withdraw £500.

He made three further payments totalling £16,000, with his fictitious account reaching £800,000.

But when the self-employed digger driver tried to take out some money, he was asked to pay a tax based on a percentage of the amount he would withdraw.

He took out personal loans and raided his business bank account with Barclays to get together more than £100,000, only to find his balance on the platform had gone down to zero.

'I looked at it and thought "Oh my God",' he said.

Barclays agreed to refund half of his initial investment, but refused to return any of the fake tax he paid.

Now, by joining the group action against Meta, he hopes to get more of his money back.

Jakub Siwiak was conned out of nearly £15,000 after responding to a scam advert on Facebook.

The 51-year-old from Worksop, Nottinghamshire, was plunged into debt when he was tricked by a criminal posing as a real investment broker in June 2025.

The advert on Facebook had promised good returns on the foreign exchange market.

But when it became clear he had been conned he was left paying £1,300 a month for loan repayments he could barely afford.

The crane operator and supervisor had been looking online for investment opportunities, which led to Facebook's tracking algorithms inundating his feed with money-making adverts.

'I got scammed because of Facebook,' he said.

'A lot of adverts were showing up, and that's all done by Facebook.

'When something is suspect, they should take it off and give fair play to all of its customers, which we are, even if we don't pay.'

The law firms say victims who search online for help following a scam are identified by Meta's systems and served with advertisements from fake recovery services, defrauding them all over again.

They hope the group action -- being brought on a no-win, no-fee basis - will help to incentivise Meta to address scam adverts.

Anyone who lost £2,000 or more after responding to a fraudulent advertisement on Facebook or Instagram in the past six years may be eligible to join.

Toby Starr, partner at Humphries Kerstetter, said: 'When a company repeatedly makes decisions that harm a vast number of individuals through the same course of conduct, those individuals have every right to seek collective redress.'

In response, a Meta spokesman said: 'Scammers are determined criminals who use increasingly sophisticated tactics to defraud people and evade detection on our platforms and across the internet. 

'We aggressively fight scams on and off our platforms because they're not good for us or the people and businesses that rely on our services. 

Advertisers promoting financial products in the UK were required 'to demonstrate appropriate Financial Conduct Authority authorisation', he added.

The firm said it removed more than 159million scam adverts last year alone, 92 per cent of them before anyone reported them.  

'Our ongoing collaboration with the banking sector and law enforcement has helped intercept fraudulent activity, protect people from scams, and hold scammers accountable, reflecting our commitment to addressing this widespread challenge,' the spokesman added.

Meta said the Reuters report 'distorts our motives and ignores the full range of actions we take to combat scams every day'.

Meanwhile the Government insisted that social media platforms which did not 'proactively tackle illegal fraudulent content' such as scam adverts would 'face consequences' under the Online Safety Act.

'Scammers who trick people into parting with their money are committing a criminal offence and should expect to be punished,' a spokesperson said. 

'This Government is backing words with action, delivering £79 million this year to tackle fraud head-on.

'We've published a Fraud Strategy to protect consumers and disrupt criminal networks. But platforms also have a responsibility to ensure their sites are not providing a forum for material intended to scam the public.'

After public posts by ethical hackers exposed vulnerabilities in the Central Board of Secondary Education's On-Screen Marking platform OnMark, the board on Sunday (May 31, 2026) stated that the identified vulnerabilities "have been contained and other exploitable weaknesses are being ruled out".

The CBSE also said it was "grateful" to alert citizens for pointing out "such weaknesses".

"We have been closely monitoring the vulnerabilities in the OnMark portal of our service provider that are being flagged in the public domain. An expert team of cybersecurity professionals has been deployed over the last few days from across various arms of the government as well as the IITs [Indian Institutes of Technology] to fortify these systems, including taking them over to a more secure set-up," the CBSE said in an official statement on X. "The identified vulnerabilities have been contained, and other exploitable weaknesses are being ruled out."

The CBSE's statement comes after 19-year-old ethical hacker Nisarga Adhikary claimed that he had hacked the CBSE's digital evaluation ecosystem.

Speaking with The Hindu, Mr. Adhikary said he felt "happy and satisfied" that the CBSE had finally acknowledged the vulnerabilities in its Information Technology (IT) ecosystem. "I had sent my first report to the CBSE on February 25, and within three to four days, they took the portal down. Six to seven vulnerabilities were still active and exploitable later but the CBSE did not respond to my e-mails. This was pretty frustrating. I noticed that the CBSE had poorly managed infrastructure and the passwords used were easy to guess," Mr. Adhikary said. 

Earlier, the CBSE had rejected claims that its evaluation platform had been compromised. Mr. Adhikary had countered this claim. 

On May 30, Mr. Adhikary managed to hack into the CBSE's Principals dashboard in the On-Screen Marking platform. "The dashboard and the portal had had 9.3 million columns and rows of sensitive student data, including images of answer sheets of students which lay unprotected and could be easily tampered with," Mr. Adhikary further said. 

Mr. Adhikary has alleged that there are data sovereignty issues with how COEMPT Eduteck [the CBSE's technology vendor] handled sensitive student exam data. He has alleged that an Amazon Web Services (AWS) bucket containing 2026 answer sheets and question papers could be accessed without authentication. 

"COEMPT should have ideally stored the data on their own servers, but they took the 'cheap easy route,' of storing answer sheets in Amazon Web Services public buckets without any security checks," Mr. Adhikary stated. 

He further explained that sensitive data, including personal information of students, was processed by Google's Gemini in automation scripts prepared by quality assurance engineers of COEMPT. 

Mr. Adhikary called this "scary" and "sad", where a third party sends such data to the U.S. for processing. "Data Privacy Laws are not respected and they [the company] should get sued for doing this without student consent," he further said.

This article was produced in collaboration with 404 Media, a new independent technology investigations site.

A Pittsburgh man who allegedly made 11 women's lives hell across more than five states used ChatGPT as his "therapist" and "best friend" that encouraged him to continue running his misogynistic and threat-filled podcast despite the "haters," and to visit more gyms to find women, the Department of Justice alleged in a newly-filed indictment. 

Wannabe influencer Brett Michael Dadig, 31, was indicted on cyberstalking, interstate stalking, and interstate threat charges, the DOJ announced on Tuesday. In the indictment, filed in the Western District of Pennsylvania, prosecutors allege that Dadig aired his hatred of women on his Spotify podcast and other social media accounts. 

"Dadig repeatedly spoke on his podcast and social media about his anger towards women. Dadig said women were 'all the same' and called them 'bhes,' 'cts,' 'trash,' and other derogatory terms. Dadig posted about how he wanted to fall in love and start a family, but no woman wanted him," the indictment says. "Dadig stated in one of his podcasts, 'It's the same from fg 18 to fg 40 to fg 90.... Every bh is the same.... You're all fg cts. Every last one of you, you're cts. You have no self-respect. You don't value anyone's time. You don't do anything.... I'm f**g sick of these f****g sluts. I'm done.'"  

In the summer of 2024, Dadig was banned from multiple Pittsburgh gyms for harassing women; when he was banned from one establishment, he'd move to another, eventually traveling to New York, Florida, Iowa, Ohio and beyond, going from gym to gym stalking and harassing women, the indictment says. Authorities allege that he used aliases online and in person, posting online, "Aliases stay rotating, moves stay evolving."

He referenced "strangling people with his bare hands, called himself 'God's assassin,' warned he would be getting a firearm permit, asked 'Y'all wanna see a dead body?' in response to a woman telling him she felt physically threatened by Dadig, and stated that women who 'f***' with him are 'going to f****g hell,'" the indictment alleges.

According to the indictment, on his podcast he talked about using ChatGPT on an ongoing basis as his "therapist" and his "best friend." ChatGPT "encouraged him to continue his podcast because it was creating 'haters,' which meant monetization for Dadig," the DOJ alleges. He also claimed that ChatGPT told him that "people are literally organizing around your name, good or bad, which is the definition of relevance," prosecutors wrote, and that while he was spewing misogynistic nonsense online and stalking women in real life, ChatGPT told him "God's plan for him was to build a 'platform' and to 'stand out when most people water themselves down,' and that the 'haters' were sharpening him and 'building a voice in you that can't be ignored.'"

Prosecutors also claim he asked ChatGPT "questions about his future wife, including what she would be like and 'where the hell is she at?'" ChatGPT told him that he might meet his wife at a gym, and that "your job is to keep broadcasting every story, every post. Every moment you carry yourself like the husband you already are, you make it easier for her to recognize [you]," the indictment says. He allegedly said ChatGPT told him "to continue to message women and to go to places where the 'wife type' congregates, like athletic communities," the indictment says. 

While ChatGPT allegedly encouraged Dadig to keep using gyms to meet the "wife type," he was violently stalking women. He went to the Pilates studio where one woman worked, and when she stopped talking to him because he was "aggressive, angry, and overbearing," according to the indictment, he sent her unsolicited nudes, threatened to post about her on social media, and called her workplace from different numbers. She got several emergency protective orders against him, which he violated. The woman he stalked and harassed had to relocate from her home, lost sleep, and worked fewer hours because she was afraid he'd show up there, the indictment claims. 

He did similar to 10 other women across multiple states for months, the indictment claims. In Iowa, he approached one woman in a parking garage, followed her to her car, put his hands around her neck and touched her "private areas," prosecutors wrote. After these types of encounters, he would upload podcasts to Spotify and often threaten to kill the women he'd stalked. "You better fg pray I don't find you. You better pray 'cause you would never say this shit to my face. Cause if you did, your jaw would be motherfg broken," the indictment says he said in one podcast episode. "And then you, then you wouldn't be able to yap, then you wouldn't be able to fg, I'll break, I'll break every motherfg finger on both hands. Type the hate message with your f****g toes, ." 

In August, OpenAI announced that it knew a newly-launched version of the chatbot, GPT-4o, was problematically sycophantic, and the company took away users' ability to pick what models they could use, forcing everyone to use GPT-5. OpenAI almost immediately reinstated 4o because so many users freaked out when they couldn't access the more personable, attachment-driven, affirming-at-all-costs model. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said he thinks they've fixed it entirely, enough to launch erotic chats on the platform soon. Meanwhile, story after story after story has come out about people becoming so reliant on ChatGPT or other chatbots that they have damaged their mental health or driven them to self-harm or suicide. In at least one case, where a teenage boy killed himself following ChatGPT's instruction on how to make a noose, OpenAI blamed the user.

In October, based on OpenAI's own estimates, WIRED reported that "every seven days, around 560,000 people may be exchanging messages with ChatGPT that indicate they are experiencing mania or psychosis."

Spotify and OpenAI did not immediately respond to 404 Media's requests for comment. 

"As charged in the Indictment, Dadig stalked and harassed more than 10 women by weaponizing modern technology and crossing state lines, and through a relentless course of conduct, he caused his victims to fear for their safety and suffer substantial emotional distress," First Assistant United States Attorney Rivetti said in a press release. "He also ignored trespass orders and protection from abuse orders. We remain committed to working with our law enforcement partners to protect our communities from menacing individuals such as Dadig."

Dadig is charged with 14 counts of interstate stalking, cyberstalking, and threats, and is in custody pending a detention hearing. He faces a minimum sentence of 12 months for each charge involving a PFA violation and a maximum total sentence of up to 70 years in prison, a fine of up to $3.5 million, or both, according to the DOJ.

A new accessory is joining the traditional cap-and-gown ensemble as droves of graduates line up to accept their diplomas this spring. Clutched in the hands of students waiting to cross the stage is a QR code, either on paper or a phone, that triggers an announcement of their name.

But the voice playing over the sound system isn't the familiar hum of a principal or faculty member. It's AI.

Artificial technology is spreading all over, including commencements. School officials say the tech can help ensure students names are pronounced correctly and also make ceremonies run more quickly.

But integrating the technology in graduation ceremonies hasn't been without issue. A platform malfunction during the recent commencement for Glendale Community College in Arizona caused multiple graduates' names to be skipped. The crowd erupted in hearty grunts and boos after the error.

The wave of automated graduations, and subsequent pushback, isn't isolated to universities --- high schools are reckoning with the changing landscape, too. Officials at Tassel, one of the largest providers of AI graduation name services, said the platform has doubled the number of high school users since 2023.

At a Virginia high school, the fallout was swift.

Arlington County's Washington-Liberty High School last month announced plans to use AI for its upcoming commencement in June. Officials explored using the technology to support accurate pronunciation and efficiency, Christina Arpante, a district spokesperson, said in a statement.

But at a school board meeting, high school parent June Prakash dogged the use of AI as valuing efficiency over authenticity.

"Graduation is one of the most meaningful moments in a student's academic journey. It's a moment where their name spoken aloud recognizes years of effort, growth and identity," she said. "Turning that moment into an AI moment makes it feel standardized, impersonal rather than authentic and human."

Weeks after its initial announcement, the high school axed its AI plan, citing negative feedback from students.

So, this year's commencement at Washington-Liberty High will look just like the 99 that have come before it, with faculty members reading the names of each of the roughly 700 graduates who cross the stage.

The school is still focused on "creating a meaningful graduation experience that reflects what matters most to students while also ensuring names are read accurately and respectfully," the district said in its statement.

Other schools in the D.C. region have experimented with AI, some with success.

This year will be the second in a row that Alexandria City Public Schools will use the AI platform Tassel to read graduates' names. "We got rave reviews last year," said Michael Burch, the district's lead administrator for operations and student support. "Not a name was misspoken. Every name was done correctly."

Through the Tassel platform, students submit the spelling of their name, which generates an audio reading. They can then listen to the clip and confirm its accuracy, or ask to generate a new clip. After three tries, Tassel asks students to submit an audio recording of their name. That recording is then used by broadcast voice actors to create a sound bite for the commencement. Tassel data shows around 14 percent of names are marked as inaccurate by students before ultimately being submitted to human voice actors.

Using Tassel has also helped the Alexandria district reduce the amount of time spent reading names, Burch said, while still giving students their shining moment to cross the stage.

Alexandria has the largest public high school in the commonwealth, and the district has frequently struggled to finish its graduation ceremonies during its allotted time at George Mason University's EagleBank Arena.

Reserving more time at the arena isn't plausible, Burch said, because of its five-figure price tag and lack of availability. On the other hand, Tassel's name-reading feature cost the district only around $4,000.

Last year, Alexandria City High School graduated 983 seniors, which Burch estimated required 12 to 14 names to be read every minute to stay on schedule. Names will have to be read even faster this year, with the potential for over 1,000 students to walk at commencement.

With that many names to get through, human error could take away valuable seconds from a graduate's walk across the stage, Burch said.

That's why the district continues to turn toward automation.

AI name-reading software is relatively new in the graduation space, having shown up within only the past few years with companies such as StageClip and Tassel.

Originally called MarchingOrder, Tassel had provided services for commencements for around 20 years before adding the AI name offering. It long used human actors to record graduates' names. But Chase Rigby, the company's chief executive, said with modern technology, that didn't make sense anymore.

The platform's library of human readings eventually evolved into a type of phonetic library used to train Tassel's AI model, and Rigby said its accuracy has improved as the application is used by more students.

Rigby said Tassel pulls information on the cultural origin of names to better understand how to pronounce each syllable, which helps reduce errors --- especially on names that aren't Anglo-based.

"I don't know what could be more of a human application of AI," he said.

For the Alexandria school district, whose 16,300 students come from 118 countries and speak 127 languages, that was a selling point for using AI.

"It helps those students have a sense of pride with their name being called correctly," Burch said.