~3.5k: Suspects arrested during Haechi IV, a six-month Interpol operation targeting cybercrimes including voice phishing, romance scams, and ecommerce fraud. Interpol reclaimed $300m in assets across 34 countries and blocked 82k+ suspicious bank accounts. UK authorities also reported numerous cases in which AI was used to scam, harass, and extort victims by impersonating the voices of people known to the victims.
24: Accidents per 1k Tesla drivers from November 2022 to November 2023, making them the most crash-prone motorists in the US, per a LendingTree study. Pontiac, Mercury, and Saturn drivers tied for the least accidents with less than 10 per 1k drivers, while BMW drivers were found to be the most likely to drink and drive. Racking up the most incidents overall, however, were Ram drivers.
7.13m: But is the safest driver… no driver? Waymo’s first safety report compared 7m+ miles across Phoenix, LA, and San Francisco and found that, compared to human driving benchmarks, its autonomous vehicles were 6.7x less likely to be involved in a crash resulting in an injury and 2.3x less likely to be in a crash reported by police. Within those 7.13m miles, there were three total crashes resulting in injuries, all minor.
$750k: The price of a Hermes Himalaya Birkin bag with diamond hardware, which you probably did not get for Christmas. But someone once did, and Nicole Pollard Bayme, the luxury stylist who tracked down the rare gift, charged $600/hour to do so. The ultra-wealthy apparently recruit elite services to find lavish gifts, per Business Insider — like a $5m vineyard and mansion. And to think, I’m happy with a nice candle.
