crime – Economist Writing Every Day

Potential Effects on Nvidia of Jensen Huang’s Affair with Alleged Chinese Spy

November 10, 2026November 10, 2026Scott Buchanan1 Comment

You couldn’t make this up. The CEO of the second most valuable company on earth, at the very center of the AI technology which is driving, well, everything, including the U.S./China rivalry – – Jensen Huang himself – – over the weekend acknowledged over the weekend in an internal Nvidia memo that he had had an extramarital affair, and the company announced an investigation. The issue is not his personal infidelity, but the fact that the other woman in the case is almost certainly one Alice Huang (a.k.a. Huang Le) who is suspected by U.S. intelligence (per the NY Times) to be a Chinese spy.

There seems no question about the affair. There are lots of public photographs indicating an intimate relationship, and Huang outright admitted it, although he refrained from naming names. But who is Alice Huang? That turns out to be a very, very difficult question to answer.

She is reportedly a Chinese citizen, and was presumably born and raised and schooled there. I could find no solid information on her background. I asked Claude, and got this non-answer:

Birthplace and upbringing: I found no source giving either. AFP calls public details about her sparse. france24

Education: Officechai says there is no verified public record of where she studied or what degrees she holds. A fund-database profile lists jobs but, as far as the reporting says, no schools, and AFP couldn’t verify that profile or who wrote it. officechai france24

Some sources claim that she worked as a TV reporter in China, but other news organizations have checked and found those claims to be baseless. So…you have this person from China, coming seemingly out of nowhere, who rather suddenly as head of as her own firm Huang Le Ltd (registered in the British Virgin Islands) became owner of a spinoff (Megaspeed) of a Chinese company, which in turn rather suddenly becomes one of the biggest Asian importers of those oh-so-special Nvidia chips. There seems to be no ready accounting for how her firm was financed to buy Megaspeed, and or how such a tiny new firm could buy $4.6 billion (!!) in chips from Nvidia. Thus, some invisible hand deftly placed this hot youngish woman from China in a position where she would almost certainly come in personal contact with Jensen Huang.

She apparently palled around with Jensen in the years 2024-2025, but now has disappeared from her management roles and from public view. She seems to have been well-enough advised to avoid making outright illegal business moves (thus evading criminal prosecution in Singapore), but all this caught the attention of U.S. authorities as early as the late Biden administration, leading them to believe she was a tool of Chinese state intelligence – at least, that is what various news outlets have reported. It’s impossible to know what did or did not transpire between Huang and Huang regarding chip technology or policies, whatever else they talked about. It is a positive that Jensen has publicly acknowledged this affair, since that removes the blackmail lever which is often the point of such “honey pot” entrapments.

What effect might this all have on Nvidia? Well, first, its stock price was down sharply on Monday, erasing some $200 billion in shareholder value, when the rest of the chip stocks were recovering smartly from the fears from the midterms that the Democrats would shut down data center construction.

A lengthy, messy investigation might compromise Jensen Huang’s iconic role at Nvidia, leading potentially to his departure. The company would forge ahead without him, but his loss would be a blow. Even if he stays, his public image of a loyal, disciplined, trustworthy man has been badly tarnished. I suspect a more focused fallout will be to muzzle him as a spokesman for selling more of his AI-critical (and military-enabling) chips to China. He has been pushing for chip sales for a long time, and now it will be tougher to take him seriously as someone speaking in America’s interest.

Anyone Can Pull Funds from Your Bank Account Who Knows the Routing and Account Numbers

June 23, 2026June 23, 2026Scott Buchanan3 Comments

Imagine my surprise the other day when I noticed that $1000 had been transferred from my bank account to some nonprofit, without any knowledge or approval on my part. It turned out that an acquaintance, with no access to my banking credentials, had done this. They wanted to make a charitable donation, using a direct bank transfer rather than a credit card, to save the charity the 3% fee charged by Visa/Mastercard. I had written them a check some months back, and they accidently entered the routing number and account number from that check of mine, instead of their own account information.

Was this some unique, gross security lapse by the bank? Or can anyone drain money from your bank account from anywhere, simply knowing your routing and account numbers? After all, these numbers appear on every check you write.

In the old days, someone armed with those two numbers could print fake checks for your account and forge your signature. Sadly, the same principle holds true now in the age of electronic transfers.

The ACH network, which powers most bank-to-bank transfers, bill payments, and direct debits, was historically designed on the assumption that initiating a pull was authorization enough. Someone with your numbers can:

Set up a fake “bill pay” or utility payment pulling from your account
Add your account as a payment method on PayPal, Venmo, Amazon, or similar platforms
Set up recurring ACH debits through many merchant processors

Ouch. It seems there is really nothing you can do to prevent this, other than closing your existing account if you are worried, and opening a new account with different numbers.

The main mitigation method is to set your account to notify you every time there is an electronic transfer, and notify the bank immediately (call, and follow up in writing or bank’s message system). Start documenting all aspects of this dispute process, in case of litigation. Or at a minimum, look through every month’s statement soon after it appears, to check for shady transfers. Close or restrict the account if appropriate.

As I understand it, if you notify the bank within 60 days of when they sent the monthly statement, your max liability is $500. Beyond 60 days, you are toast – the money is just gone.

There is a slightly murky provision for limiting liability to $50 if you notify the bank within two days of you learning of the fraud (as long as that is within the 60-day window noted above). The application of this 2-day rule is clear if you are getting real-time notifications of transfers. But, say, if you slit open a printed statement the day after receiving it in the snail mail, perhaps three days after it was sent, notice a fraud and call the bank immediately, it is less clear whether you get dinged $50 or $500. If you are a good customer, I’m guessing the bank would make it $50.

All this is powerful motivation for using credit cards or Venmo/Zelle instead of paper checks. Bad guys can’t withdraw from your Venmo or Zelle unless they have your login information. With a credit card, you generally don’t get charged anything for a fraudulent transaction on your credit card (assuming you report it in reasonable time) – – plus you can usually get 2% or more cash back.

The US Homicide Rate in 2025 May Have Been the Lowest Ever

January 28, 2026Jeremy Horpedahl1 Comment

The following chart merges two data sources to create a long-run series on homicides in the US. Based on early estimates for 2025 from Jeff Asher, the homicide rate may be as low as 4.3 murders per 100,000 population. That would be the lowest since at least 1900, and possibly the lowest US homicide rate ever since the best evidence suggests it was even higher pre-1900. The current record low was 4.4 murders per 100,000, which the US saw in 1955, 1957, and 2014.

You Read It Here First

August 28, 2025James Bailey1 Comment

The subjects of two of our posts from 2023 are suddenly big stories.

First, here’s how I summed up New Orleans’ recovery from hurricane Katrina then:

Large institutions (university medical centers, the VA, the airport, museums, major hotels) have been driving this phase of the recovery. The neighborhoods are also recovering, but more slowly, particularly small business. Population is still well below 2005 levels. I generally think inequality has been overrated in national discussions of the last 15 years relative to concerns about poverty and overall prosperity, but even to me New Orleans is a strikingly unequal city; there’s so much wealth alongside so many people seeming to get very little benefit from it. The most persistent problems are the ones that remain from before Katrina: the roads, the schools, and the crime; taken together, the dysfunctional public sector.

The New York Times had a similar take yesterday:

Today, New Orleans is smaller, poorer and more unequal than before the storm. It hasn’t rebuilt a durable middle class, and lacks basic services and a major economic engine outside of its storied tourism industry…. New Orleans now ranks as the most income-unequal major city in America…. In areas that attracted investment — the French Quarter, the Bywater and the shiny biomedical corridor — there are few outward signs of the hurricane’s impact. But travel to places like Pontchartrain Park, Milneburg and New Orleans East that were once home to a vibrant Black middle class, and there are abandoned homes and broken streets — entire communities that never regained their pre-Katrina luster…. Meanwhile, basic city functions remain unreliable.

I wrote in 2023 about a then-new Philadelphia Fed working paper claiming that mortgage fraud is widespread:

The fraud is that investors are buying properties to flip or rent out, but claim they are buying them to live there in order to get cheaper mortgages…. One third of all investors is a lot of fraud!… such widespread fraud is concerning, and I hope lenders (especially the subsidized GSEs) find a way to crack down on it…. This mortgage fraud paper seems like a bombshell to me and I’m surprised it seems to have received no media attention; journalists take note. For everyone else, I suppose you read obscure econ blogs precisely to find out about the things that haven’t yet made the papers.

Well, that paper has now got its fair share of attention from the media and the GSEs. Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has been going after Biden-appointed Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook over allegations that she mis-stated her primary residence on a mortgage application:

Pulte has written many dozens of tweets about this, at least one of which cited the Philly Fed paper:

Now President Trump is trying to fire Cook. Federal Reserve Governors can only be fired “for cause” and none ever have been, but Trump is using this alleged mortgage fraud to try to make Cook the first.

The Trump administration seems to have made the same realization as Xi Jinping did back in 2012– that when corruption is sufficiently widespread, some of your political opponents have likely engaged in it and so can be legally targeted in an anti-corruption crackdown (while corruption by your friends is overlooked).

I’m one of a few people hoping for the Fed to be run the most competent technocrats with a minimum of political interference:

But I’m not expecting it.

Remember, you read it here first.

Change in Homicide Rates from Pre-Pandemic in Large US Cities

June 4, 2025Jeremy Horpedahl1 Comment

We all know that homicides spiked in the US in 2020 and we all (hopefully) know that homicides have been falling across most of the country dramatically since the end of 2021. But have homicides started to get back to, or even below, pre-pandemic levels? Or is it merely reversing the 2020 increases?

The answer depends on the city and the pre-pandemic baseline! The chart below shows the 10 largest cities (with Fort Worth instead of Jacksonville, because the Real-Time Crime Index doesn’t include the latter) in the US, using a base of either January 2018 (the first month in the RTCI) or December 2019 (just before the pandemic, and murders had fallen nationally between these two dates):

The murder data comes from the Real-Time Crime Index, and it is a 12-month total so we shouldn’t have to worry about seasonality even though the months are different. I use Census annual city population estimates to calculate the rates (and estimate 2025 based on the growth from 2023-24).

As you can see, depending on the base timeframe used, about half of the cities saw declines, a few were roughly flat, and some definitely saw increases. New York, Houston, and Fort Worth are definitely still elevated. Los Angeles, Philly, Phoenix, and San Diego are definitely down. The others are either close to even or mixed depending on your baseline.

Keep in mind these data are only through March 2025. As both Billy Binion at Reason and Jeff Asher have both recently emphasized, if we use the most recent data for many cities, it’s entirely possible that 2025 will end up having some of the lowest homicide rates ever recorded for many US cities. The declines in early 2025 have definitely been big, but mostly they are just a continuation of the post-2021 decline.

Again, for clarification, all of these cities are down from their 2020-21 peaks: using September 2021 as the base (when the national murder rate roughly peaked), these 10 cities are down between 31% and 58%. Big improvements!

“Final Notice” Traffic Ticket Smishing Scam

June 3, 2025July 13, 2025Scott BuchananLeave a comment

Yesterday I got a scary-sounding text message, claiming that I have an outstanding traffic ticket in a certain state, and threatening me with the following if I did not pay within two days:

We will take the following actions:

1. Report to the DMV Breach Database

2. Suspend your vehicle registration starting June 2

3. Suspension of driving privileges for 30 days…

4. You may be sued and your credit score will suffer

Please pay immediately before execution to avoid license suspension and further legal disputes.

Oh, my!

A link (which I did NOT click on) was provided for “payment”.

I also got an almost (not quite) identical text a few days earlier. I was almost sure these were scams, but it was comforting to confirm that by going to the web and reading that, yes, these sorts of texts are the flavor of the month in remote rip-offs; as a rule, states do not send out threatening texts with payment links in them.

These texts are examples of “smishing”, which is phishing (to collect identity or bank/credit card information) via SMS text messaging. It must be a lucrative practice. According to spam blocker Robokiller, Americans received 19.2 billion spam robo texts in May 2025. That’s nearly 63 spam texts for every person in the U.S.

Beside these traffic ticket scams, I often get texts asking me to click to track delivery of some package, or to prevent the misuse of my credit card, etc. I have been spared text messages from the Nigerian prince who needs my help to claim his rightful inheritance; I did get an email from him some years back.

The FTC keeps a database called Sentinel on fraud complaints made to the FTC and to law enforcement agencies. People reported losing a total of $12 billion to fraud in 2024, an increase of $2 billion over the previous year. That is a LOT of money (and a commentary on how wealthy Americans are, if that much can get skimmed off with little net impact on society). The biggest single category for dollar loss was investment; the number of victims was smaller than for other categories, but the loss per victim ($9,200) was quite high. Other areas with high median losses per capita were Business and Job Opportunities ($2,250) and Mortgage Foreclosure Relief and Debt Management ($1,500).

Imposter scams like the texts I have gotten (sender pretending to be from state DMV, post office, bank, credit card company, etc.) were by far the largest category by number reported (845,806 in 2024). Of those imposter reports, 22% involved actual losses ($800 median loss), totaling a hefty $2,952 million. That is a juicy enough haul to keep those robo frauds coming.

How to not get scammed: Be suspicious of every email or text, especially ones that prey on emotions like fear or greed or curiosity and try to engage you to payments or for prying information out of you. If it purports to come from some known entity like Bank of America or your state DMV, contact said entity directly to check it out. If you don’t click on anything (or reply in any way to the text, like responding with Y or N), it can’t hurt you.

I’m not sure how much they can do, considering the bad guys tend to hijack legit phone numbers for their dirty work, but you can mark these texts as spam to help your phone carrier improve their spam detection algorithm. Also, reporting scam texts to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and/or the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center can help build their data set, and perhaps lead to law enforcement actions.

Later add: According to EZPass, here is how to report text scams:

You can report smishing messages to your cell carrier by following this FCC guidance. This service is provided by most cell carriers.

Hold down the spam TXT/SMS message with your finger
Select the “Forward” option
Enter 7726 as the recipient and press “Send”

Additionally, to report the message to the FBI, visit the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (ic3.gov) and select ‘File a Complaint’ to do so. When completing the complaint, include the phone number where the smishing text originated, and the website link listed within the text.

Study Shows AI Can Enable Information-Stealing (Phishing) Campaigns

January 14, 2025January 14, 2025Scott BuchananLeave a comment

As a computer user, I make a modest effort to stay informed regarding the latest maneuvers by the bad guys to steal information and money. I am on a mailing list for the Malwarebytes blog, which publishes maybe three or four stories a week in this arena.

Here are three stories from the latest Malwarebytes email:

( 1 ) AI-supported spear phishing fools more than 50% of targets A controlled study reveals that 54% of users were tricked by AI-supported spear phishing emails, compared to just 12% who were targeted by traditional, human-crafted ones. ( 2 ) Dental group lied through teeth about data breach, fined $350,000 Westend Dental denied a 2020 ransomware attack and associated data breach, telling its customers that their data was lost due to an “accidentally formatted hard drive”. The company agreed to pay $350,000 to settle HIPAA violations ( 3 ) “Can you try a game I made?” Fake game sites lead to information stealers Victims lured to a fake game website where they were met with an information stealer instead of the promised game.

The first item here fits with our interest in the promise and perils of AI, so I will paste a couple of self-explanatory excerpts in italics:

One of the first things everyone predicted when artificial intelligence (AI) became more commonplace was that it would assist cybercriminals in making their phishing campaigns more effective.

Now, researchers have conducted a scientific study into the effectiveness of AI supported spear phishing, and the results line up with everyone’s expectations: AI is making it easier to do crimes.

The study, titled Evaluating Large Language Models’ Capability to Launch Fully Automated Spear Phishing Campaigns: Validated on Human Subjects, evaluates the capability of large language models (LLMs) to conduct personalized phishing attacks and compares their performance with human experts and AI models from last year.

To this end the researchers developed and tested an AI-powered tool to automate spear phishing campaigns. They used AI agents based on GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to search the web for available information on a target and use this for highly personalized phishing messages.

With these tools, the researchers achieved a click-through rate (CTR) that marketing departments can only dream of, at 54%. The control group received arbitrary phishing emails and achieved a CTR of 12% (roughly 1 in 8 people clicked the link).

Another group was tested against an email generated by human experts which proved to be just as effective as the fully AI automated emails and got a 54% CTR. But the human experts did this at 30 times the cost of the AI automated tools.

…

…The key to the success of a phishing email is the level of personalization that can be achieved by the AI assisted method and the base for that personalization can be provided by an AI web-browsing agent that crawls publicly available information.

Based on information found online about the target, they are invited to participate in a project that aligns with their interest and presented with a link to a site where they can find more details.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

But there is good news as well. We can use AI to fight AI: … LLMs are also getting better at recognizing phishing emails. Claude 3.5 Sonnet scored well above 90% with only a few false alarms and detected several emails that passed human detection. Although it struggles with some phishing emails that are clearly suspicious to most humans.

In addition, the blog article cited some hard evidence for year-over-year progress in AI capabilities: a year ago, unassisted AI was unable to match the phishing performance of human-generated phishing messages. But now, AI can match and even slightly exceed the effectiveness of human phishing. This is….progress, I guess.

P.S. I’d feel remiss if I did not remind us all yet again, it’s safest to never click on a link embedded in an email message, if you can avoid it. If the email purports to be from a company, it’s safest to go directly to the company’s website and do your business there.

Homicides in 2024 Were Down Significantly

January 2, 2025January 2, 2025Jeremy Horpedahl4 Comments

The tragic act of terrorism in New Orleans early on New Year’s Day might seem like confirmation to many that crime, especially in big cities, is still at elevated levels from before the pandemic. But we have to be very careful with anecdotes, no matter how deadly and visible.

Using data from the New Orleans Police Department dashboard, which has been updated through December 31, 2024, we see that 2024 had the lowest number of homicides going back to 2011, which likely makes it one of the safest years on record in New Orleans:

New Orleans is not alone.

Using data from the Real Time Crime Index, we see that among the 10 largest cities in the US in their index, through the first 10 months of the 2024 (the most recent available for all these cities), homicides are down 16.9% compared to 2023.

Murders in these 10 largest cities are still about 5.6% above the first 10 months of 2019, but three of the 10 cities (Dallas, Philadelphia, and San Diego) are already below the first 10 months of 2019, by fairly significant margins (-13.7%, -26.2%, and -21.6%). Once we have all 12 months of data for these cities, I suspect that a few more will be back to 2019 levels.

Crime is indeed still a major social problem in much of the US, but we are getting back to 2019 levels of social problems — which is still bad, but violent crime is not high and rising, as many seem to believe based on very notable and horrific events.

(The 10 largest cities in the RT Crime Index are Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, and San Diego.)

Real Time Crime Index

October 24, 2024December 5, 2025James BaileyLeave a comment

If you want to know how many pigs were killed in the United States yesterday, the USDA has the answer. But if you want to know how many humans were killed in the US this month, the FBI is going to need a year or two to figure it out. The new Real Time Crime Index, though, can tell you much sooner, by putting together the faster local agency reports:

Trends currently look good, though murders still aren’t quite back to pre-2020 levels.

In addition to graphing top-line state and national trends, the Real Time Crime Index also offers the option to download a CSV with city-level data going back to 2018. This seems like a great resource for researchers, worthy of adding to my page of most-improved datasets.

Did Sherlock Holmes Really Wear a Deerstalker Hat?

September 24, 2024September 23, 2024Scott BuchananLeave a comment

Quick, who is the guy on the right in the illustration below?

Image: YouTube

Here he is again:

We’d know him anywhere, thanks to that deerstalker cap. This was a practical hat used by hunters and other outdoorsmen in England at the time. It was popular with women as well as men. The front and back brims warded off rain and sun. The ear flaps tied under the chin for cold weather or wind. The flaps were tied at the top when they were not down. Holmes’s hat was apparently in a hounds-tooth tweed pattern of water-shedding wool.

How often did Arthur Conan Doyle feature his detective character wearing this headgear? Actually, he didn’t at all. The stories never once mention Holmes in a deerstalker cap (or an Inverness cape, another Sherlock Holmes trope), although such a hat is not implausible.

When the first sets of Sherlock Holmes stories appeared serialized in the Strand magazine in the early 1890’s, they were illustrated by artist Sidney Paget. Paget is responsible for the deerstalker cap image. Here is the detective and his sidekick on the way to investigate the Boscombe Valley mystery:

Image: Wikipedia The Boscombe Valley Mystery

It would seem that Sherlock Holmes lived and died by his deerstalker, as evidenced by Paget’s illustration on the detective’s struggle to the death with the arch-villain Professor Moriarity above Reichenbach Falls, in The Final Problem:

Image: Wikipedia

( Doyle wrote The Final Problem to kill off his detective character, so the author could move on to more dignified pursuits than writing Sherlock Holmes stories. He did not anticipate the public outcry at the demise of the popular character. Men in London wore black armbands, and subscriptions to the Strand magazine were cancelled in protest. Eventually Doyle brought Holmes back in a further series of stories, with the literary device that Holmes had faked his own death in order to hide out from a criminal syndicate. )

Even Paget did not keep Holmes in this hat all the time. When the great detective was not sleuthing in the outdoors, he was properly dressed for English society. It was unthinkable for a gentleman to appear in public without some kind of hat. For instance, here are two illustrations from The Adventure of Silver Blaze. Holmes is depicted below in his deerstalker when confronting a bad guy at the gate of a neighboring farm, after tracking a horse across the moor: