Criminals are cloning voices and making calls to trick victims into sending them money. How can they be stopped?

Jennifer DiStefano , a mother of four, got a call one day from an unknown number. Two of her children were off snowboarding, so she picked up, worried that one of them might have been injured. It was her daughter Bree, screaming, crying and pleading for help. A man came on the line and told DiStefano that he had kidnapped her daughter and that if she didn’t pay up, he would kill her.

DiStefano was terrified, but her fear and horror was the only real thing about that phone call. Bree had not been kidnapped, she was with her brother, safe. Instead, scammers had used AI to replicate Bree’s voice so accurately that her own mother could not recognise the difference – and they were using it to try to extort money from DiStefano.

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Fraudsters using fake handles displaying paid-for blue checkmark icon to carry out phishing scams

Consumers who complain of poor customer service on X are being targeted by scammers after the social media platform formerly known as Twitter changed its account verification process.

Bank customers and airline passengers are among those at risk of phishing scams when they complain to companies via X. Fraudsters, masquerading as customer service agents, respond under fake X handles, and trick victims into disclosing their bank details to get a promised refund.

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Charity Full Fact finds more than 1,200 false posts on topics from deadly snakes to serial killers at large

Members of local Facebook groups have been exposed to hundreds of hoax posts, including false reports of missing children or deadly snakes on the loose, a study shows.

The fact-checking charity Full Fact found more than 1,200 false posts on the social media site’s community groups across the world, and warned that these were probably just “the tip of the iceberg”.

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He’s done his time in jail and now Billy McFarland has something new to sell. But who’s going to buy it this time?

You may remember Billy McFarland, if not the name then the image that, six years ago, frequently accompanied public mention of him: an open cheese sandwich sweating gently on a bed of white polystyrene. McFarland was jailed in 2018 for fraud after the collapse, a year earlier, of his Fyre festival, the disastrous party on a Bahamian island that took down a generation of mid-list influencers .

Failure so large that it results in not one, but two documentaries , not to mention the prison sentence, might inspire shame in a lesser individual. But McFarland is back in business, and his plans are bigger than ever.

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I finally found a perfect little house in the countryside that was both affordable and accessible – but was it too good to be true?

The Craigslist rental listing was fresh, less than a day old. Gazing at the little cottage in north Georgia, I could practically see a halo around it. The area was rural but not too isolated, the streets tree-lined and hilly. At just 925 sq ft, it looked perfect for a singleton like me. The $700 deposit was also very manageable – much too low, in retrospect. But affordability was crucial for me as a self-employed writer whose income ebbs and flows.

You should know I was skeptical – it definitely seemed too good to be true. It was autumn 2021, well into this country’s pandemic real estate boom . Rock-bottom mortgage rates and ubiquitous remote working had unleashed a flood of new buyers at once. No matter where I looked for housing – in my personal network or with services like Smart City Locating – I just kept striking out. Eye-popping rent hikes were normal now, and landlords were cashing in.

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Shoppers warned to be careful with sales as collapsed budget chain only selling goods in its stores

Shoppers have been warned to avoid a spate of fake websites attempting to scam bargain hunters by pretending to offer heavily discounted goods from the collapsed budget chain Wilko.

Wilko is no longer selling goods online and has stopped all home deliveries or click and collect services after calling in administrators from PricewaterhouseCoopers on 10 August as it ran short of cash. Goods are only available to buy directly in one of its 400 stores.

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In her thrilling new book, Yepoka Yeebo tells the jaw-dropping story of a man behind a scam called ‘one of the most fascinating – and lucrative – in modern history’

The ever-proliferating grifter-lit bookshelf is on the verge of collapsing under its own weight. But Yepoka Yeebo’s contribution to the category stands out. Her meticulously researched Anansi’s Gold isn’t set in Silicon Valley or a swishy enclave such as Nantucket or Noto. Anansi’s Gold offers a tangled and mesmerizing history of Ghanaian-born John Ackah Blay-Miezah, architect of an Accra-based scam that American prosecutors called “one of the most fascinating – and lucrative – in modern history”.

The result of what the author calls a “six-year-long treasure hunt”, Anansi’s Gold involved countless hours at the library, trawls through hotel and military archives, and off-the-cuff conversations with Lyft drivers. Yeebo first heard about the story of Blay-Miezah when her mother sent her a video on WhatsApp showing a charismatic man who claimed to be the guardian of billions of dollars. “I was like, well, obviously not – that’s ridiculous,” Yeebo, 38, said by video call from her plant-filled apartment in London. “But every time I told a friend they were like, well, I’ve heard crazier stories. And I got obsessed with it.”

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When Australian comedian Michelle Brasier contacted the seller of an online purchase that never turned up, she had no idea it would be the start of an unlikely and troubling friendship

Listen, 2020 wasn’t my best year. I spent a lot of time in my bathtub – actually, a large clear storage tub in the bottom of my shower – eating bread I certainly didn’t make, and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer . Clear plastic, I discovered to my horror, is a material that fares best when it doesn’t have your flesh pressed right up against it. So I made a healthy decision to buy some workout equipment online and slowly wean myself off bathtime.

Looking on Facebook Marketplace, I found a pilates reformer, a sort of bed on rails, a lie-down trampoline, with resistance straps for your arms and legs. They are usually very expensive – at least A$2,000 (£1,560) – but this one was listed for A$500. Absolute bargain! The seller was a man named Jacob (not his real name) in Adelaide, thousands of kilometres away from me in Melbourne, and certainly beyond the 5km radius the lockdown allowed us to travel. No matter – he would courier it. Legend!

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Tyson Fury weighs in on marriage, mental health and life as a multimillionaire in Morecambe (23m57s); John Crace looks on as the PM gaslights the UK with his North Sea plan while the world burns (1m30s); and Michelle Brasier explains why she befriended her scammer (8m42s)

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