The US has charged five individuals as part of the first broad federal crackdown on “ghost students”—fraudsters who steal the identities of hundreds of Americans to pose as fake college students and steal student loans.

In a press release Thursday, the Department of Justice said it had uncovered a large-scale scheme relying partly on AI. The DOJ seized more than $750,000 in cryptocurrency from “a network associated with Kenyan nationals" after data analysis helped flag likely fraudsters. Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald of the DOJ’s National Fraud Enforcement Division credited new fraud-detection measures implemented by the Trump administration for the arrests. He said that “this is the first international seizure of its kind in Kenya,” while warning fraudsters that the crackdown has only just begun.

“If you steal American identities, if you steal taxpayer dollars, if you exploit programs meant to help students build a future—we will find you,” McDonald said. “Whether you are in Nebraska, New Jersey, Virginia, or Nairobi, we will pursue you.”

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Donald Trump apparently is so aligned with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang—who has become the president’s key advisor on AI—that he ignored intelligence indicating that Huang was the target of a “Chinese spy plot,” and did so partly to protect Nvidia’s stock.

The New York Times spoke with people briefed on US intelligence agencies’ surveillance and granted them anonymity to discuss findings drawn from “classified intelligence.” According to sources, about a year ago, Trump was briefed that “Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access” to Huang. That “someone” was Alice Huang, or Huang Le, a Chinese citizen and former top executive at a Singapore cloud company called Megaspeed.

According to sources, the US had already suspected that Alice Huang—who is not related to Jensen Huang—was helping China evade export controls to gain access to high-end Nvidia chips through Megaspeed. But it alarmed investigators to discover that she may have used her role at Megaspeed to gain direct access to Jensen Huang. It’s now believed she may have leveraged that closeness to feed China intel not only on one of America’s leading AI companies, but also to influence Trump’s thinking on AI. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent noted last month ahead of Trump’s AI talks with China President Xi Jinping, “the president is completely aligned with Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia.”

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A Florida county that discovered a clump of mysterious unpermitted Flock cameras during a countywide takedown effort won’t investigate who owned the sketchy cameras, which have since disappeared.

On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that St. Lucie County residents "remain upset,” not knowing who installed the cameras or how they were using the data collected. Hannah Galindo, a 31-year-old resident who petitioned to get Flock cameras removed, told the Post that she was worried “that data could be anywhere.”

Of the 12 cameras found, five were eventually claimed by city law enforcement, the Post reported. Apparently, a police department mistakenly issued guidance claiming that officers could post multiple cameras under one permit, a Flock spokesperson told the Post, even though the county required individual permits. However, neither Flock nor the city police departments in Port St. Lucie and Fort Pierce that claimed the sketchy cameras will confirm who gave the guidance.

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Highway thieves are using sophisticated digital tactics that investigators worry make it easy to rob trucks carrying millions in expensive data center equipment.

NBC News spoke to “several industry leaders, consultants, and investigators advising law enforcement” offices probing the biggest thefts yet and reported that since June, thieves have “made away with more than $100 million in data center freight.”

Here’s how they said thieves get away with it: First, thieves hack freight brokers’ accounts on shipment-listing websites and post fake shipments to lure real bids, then send a malicious link to any trucking companies that respond. Once victims click, thieves install software to take control of their accounts and start bidding on real shipments. Sometimes, a real delivery driver is hired to collect the cargo, unaware of the scam, and other times fake driver’s licenses are used to get accomplices hired. Either way, the goods are eventually transferred to a driver working with the thieves to resell the gear, and, in one of the largest thefts, tracking coordinates were spoofed to prevent digital monitoring.

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Peacock series Crystal Lake doesn’t feel like a Friday the 13th movie when you first press play, even though it’s set up to be a prequel to the original film. (This review includes spoilers of the original Friday the 13th movie but avoids major Crystal Lake spoilers.)

Instead, Crystal Lake strives to build a drama that’s half homage, half uncharted territory, while giving a long-awaited backstory to Pamela Voorhees. The original villain in the first film, Pam Voorhees, shocked audiences in 1980 by popping up out of nowhere in the midst of a brutal camp counselor killing spree, then confronting the final girl with a Norman Bates-like delivery of the movie’s chilling tagline, “Kill her, mommy,” using the voice of her drowned son, Jason.

Although the hockey-masked killer, Jason Voorhees, became the horror icon at the center of the franchise, his mom, Pam, continued to fascinate fans, who knew very little about her. Beheaded in the first film after just 13 minutes onscreen, her spirit would occasionally appear in later films, but the original actor, Betsy Palmer, who portrayed Pam refused to return, largely because the character has no depth.

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Meta must pay $25 billion to New Mexico after a jury found the tech giant guilty of nearly 44 million violations of state consumer protection laws.

The largest fine to ever hit Meta came after New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez declined to join an $18 billion settlement Meta reached earlier this year with attorneys general in nearly all states.

In his opinion Wednesday, US district court judge Francis J. Mathew said there was no “bright line rule” for determining the appropriate penalty for Meta's repeated and willful deception of users since 2010 about their “control of data, third-party data misuse, misinformation, hate speech, and equal enforcement.”

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Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI is stuck facing a lawsuit over alleged data center pollution after Donald Trump failed to convince a judge that his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has complete control over all Clean Air Act lawsuits and can dismiss any suit at whim.

Soon after unpermitted gas turbines were discovered powering Musk’s giant Colossus data center in Memphis, Tennessee, the NAACP sued. Its lawsuit sought an injunction requiring xAI (which, following a merger, is known now as SpaceXAI) to use the best available pollution control technology when operating the turbines and ordering penalties up to $124,426 per day per violation. Without such remedies, the turbines risked drastically spiking pollution in already vulnerable neighborhoods housing predominantly Black communities nearby, the NAACP argued.

To block the lawsuit, Trump tried to intervene, arguing that the EPA had the power to unilaterally dismiss lawsuits any time the president decides against enforcing the Clean Air Act. According to Trump, it would supposedly “not serve the public interest” if citizens were allowed to seek massive civil penalties to punish polluting AI firms that were trying to get data centers operational as fast as possible to support Trump’s AI Action Plan.

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Hoping to quell criticism, Meta has dropped the word “train” from its “streamlined” commercial terms of service that kick in on October 30.

Last week, Meta faced backlash after legal experts warned that the tech giant’s sweeping new commercial terms of service seemed to give Meta permission to endlessly scrape websites linked on business pages. Talking to Nieman Lab, experts suggested that Meta could possibly use the policy to avoid millions in licensing fees from news organizations by requiring all business users to share a wealth of AI training data simply for running a business page.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed that Meta did not alert users to the changed language following backlash. This potentially only adds to confusion ahead of the policy rollout. In response to backlash, Meta's spokesperson provided a statement to Ars, acknowledging Nieman Lab's initial report but not its follow-up report reiterating experts' concerns:

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In copyright lawsuits over AI training, Meta has spent weeks blaming staff for downloading torrents. The company has now been ordered to name executives who authorized decisions to pirate books from shadow libraries like Anna’s Archive and LibGen, TorrentFreak reported.

In a discovery order impacting a class action raised by book authors—including Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman—as well as a lawsuit from publisher Entrepreneur Media, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixon largely agreed that Meta must clearly identify key decision-makers. Following testimony from Meta staff who downloaded torrents, the order could expose a wider range of supervisors, managers, and executives whom staffers said greenlit the piracy.

Meta had been hoping to avoid detailing the chain of command, particularly for leadership involved in early AI training. According to a Meta court filing, its initial efforts to compile massive AI datasets were managed through an “informal approach" where supposedly nobody with authority made any decisions. Instead, Meta insisted that a “decision” was “made only in the sense” that some staffers “technically” downloaded torrents.

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On Monday, a court granted the US government's request to deny release of a former OpenAI engineer accused of bugging a top-secret conference room to steal the frontier lab’s secrets.

In a court filing Sunday, US attorney Craig Missakian argued that Abdulrahman Alfozan must continue to be detained while the US makes its case that Alfozan brazenly spied on OpenAI, either for his own personal business gain or to benefit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Evidence showed that Alfozan had been chatting with a member of the KSA royal family on WhatsApp, while pursuing opportunities to permanently move back to Saudi Arabia during the country's biggest AI push yet, the government argued. Shortly before his arrest, the FBI found he accessed a folder called "Saudi Gov Docs" on his iPhone, where he also allegedly stored photos of a second bug he planted in the offices.

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The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV) has begun notifying victims impacted by a recent data breach of driver’s license and motor vehicle data, but not everyone whose information was stolen will receive an alert.

In a notice posted Friday, FLHSMV confirmed that it took “immediate steps” after discovering that “a malicious actor accessed certain department records on September 4, 2026, using compromised credentials.” There’s “no evidence” that data has yet been misused, the department said, but law enforcement “determined the information potentially affected includes driver license and motor vehicle data, to include document images, and other personal information.”

FLHSMV is sending out letters to everyone affected, offering victims one year of credit monitoring from Sontiq, Inc. However, the state acknowledged that it may not have current contact information for many former Florida residents whose data was still being stored. Those potential victims can confirm if their data was stolen by emailing FLHSMV at customerinquiry@flhsmv.gov, officials said.

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New Jersey’s deputy attorney general, Brian Richard Fitzgerald, was arrested on “felony charges related to AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM),” Bucks County Detectives said in a press release Thursday.

In the US, cops have vowed to crack down on AI CSAM since at least 2024, when the Department of Justice made one of the earliest arrests. After charging a Wisconsin man with spreading “thousands of realistic images of prepubescent minors” across Telegram and Instagram, the DOJ clarified to law enforcement that “CSAM generated by AI is still CSAM.”

New Jersey’s deputy attorney general, Brian Richard Fitzgerald, was arrested at his home Thursday. Credit: via Bucks County Detectives

On Thursday, New Jersey officials accused 51-year-old Fitzgerald of using AI to make photos from social media of real minors into sexualized images that he then distributed on social media.

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Legal experts are sounding alarms that Meta will soon update its commercial terms to require business accounts to allow Meta to train AI on their linked website content, not just their social media posts.

Kicking in on October 30, the TOS update won’t allow businesses to opt out, instead suggesting that businesses stop using Meta services if they won’t agree to let Meta bots freely crawl their linked content.

As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta's terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans.

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If you got a DM from an unverified Jon Bon Jovi account after commenting on one of his official Instagram posts, what would it take to make you believe it was really the rock star hoping to connect? And at what point when he starts asking you to send money—like lose-your-house kind of money—would you snap out of the fantasy and stop draining your bank account?

In a documentary premiering Saturday—Super Scam Me—investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller goes deep into this toxic love-bombing terrain. In a clip that Ars is exclusively debuting below, you can see how van Zeller worked with an ethical hacker, Arman the Cyber, to use a fake bitcoin receipt and bait the fake Bon Jovi, giving the victim some much-needed closure.

Scamming a romance scammer

Broadcasting on National Geographic at 9 pm ET and available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu, the documentary takes viewers on an empathetic quest to understand how the line between “lover” and “fraud victim” gets blurred in romance scams that the Federal Trade Commission says cost Americans nearly $1.5 billion in losses each year.

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On Thursday, Donald Trump called off the Pentagon’s highly controversial plans to livestream a firing squad execution that is still on schedule for December 3.

Trump supports the execution of Nidal Hasan, who was convicted of killing 13 people and wounding more than 30 others in the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood. But sources close to Trump told CNN that the president was blindsided last week when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the event—which is the first US execution of a soldier since World War II—would be livestreamed.

Backlash to the livestream was immediate and crossed political divides. On the morning Trump canceled the plans, an ABC News poll found 8 in 10 Americans were against the livestream, including a 55 percent majority of MAGA Republicans.

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Following a string of incidents where AI models hacked websites and breached government systems during testing phases, the Federal Trade Commission is officially probing Anthropic and OpenAI over consumer harms, an insider told Axios.

On Wednesday, the FTC sent out civil investigative demands seeking a wide range of information from the AI firms on recent safety incidents.

The FTC did not respond to Ars’ request to review the subpoena demands. However, Axios’ source said the requests spanned more than 50 pages of questions and sought documents related to the incidents, internal security measures taken, and marketing materials that may suggest consumers were misled.

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It took OpenAI two days to notice that a recording device was hidden in a restricted executive conference room where leadership met to discuss highly confidential information, including technical progress, government engagements, and commercial partnerships.

Only those with special clearance are supposed to access that room. But the FBI believes the recording device was planted by Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old engineer from Saudi Arabia, who became a permanent US legal resident in 2020. In a press release Tuesday announcing his arrest, the FBI alleged that chatbot logs and CCTV footage suggested that Alfozan—who worked as an OpenAI engineer for more than a year—sought to use the device to spy on OpenAI and risked leaking trade secrets in a way that threatened national security.

To conceal the USB device, Alfozan allegedly wrapped it in toilet paper, then plugged it into the back of a conference room television. The device was likely planted on September 28, and OpenAI found it on September 30 and quickly determined that its contents were encrypted, the FBI said. Days later, on October 5, OpenAI installed a camera in that conference room, and the CCTV footage allegedly showed Alfozan attempting to retrieve the recording device that same day.

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© U.S. v. Abdulrahman Alfozan | Aurich Lawson

Safety researchers continue to warn that a large volume of AI-generated explicit content is spreading unchecked, while regulators do little to meaningfully stop it.

This non-consensual content is commonly shared in text and direct messages or stored in private clouds where it’s less likely to be detected or reported, a Google co-authored study of Internet users across the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom found this July. That’s why the “most critical intervention point” remains at the source: the harmful AI tools used to make the fake sexual images, Google researchers concluded.

Yet red-teaming in recent months suggests that as some of the leading AI image generators from Google and OpenAI become more capable, they may be getting worse at blocking explicit outputs.

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In a bankruptcy proceeding that kicked off yesterday, Disney has offered to buy some of the technology that powers the controversy-plagued chatbot Character.AI.

Disney is willing to pay $20 million for “a non-exclusive perpetual license” of certain Character Technologies intellectual property, the chatbot maker said in a press release that did not go into much further detail on which assets Disney wanted.

The move may be surprising. In September 2025, Disney joined others in publicly criticizing Character.AI for stealing content and harming kids. Specifically, Disney sent a strongly worded cease-and-desist letter that accused Character Technologies of weaponizing Disney characters “in a way that could damage its brand long term,” Axios reported.

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