Crime surged during COVID. But, what type of crime?

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2330443X.2022.2...

Hint: homicides and car theft. Burglary and larceny actually went down.

But, homicides surged prior to the start of the pandemic. If there is no correlation between the economic shutdown and homicides, then the crime surge was basically just car theft.

Car theft does not come from random homeless people. You don't steal a catalytic converter unless you know where you can sell it. You don't steal a car to make money, and then look around on where you can sell it. And, car theft, unless it is a car jacking, is free of violence. During COVID I think a lot of "noveau criminals" came out of the woodwork, people that were probably barely surviving with legitimate jobs that disappeared during the shutdown. I saw an article where police jailed someone that was just a father and son, caught stealing multiple cars. Those men had no prior record and that seemed very strange to me.

I'm saying all this because this attack could be by Lazarus, as another commenter pointed out. Or, could it be someone using an LLM to create a similar attack by prompting "Make me a post-install attack that looks like something the Lazarus group would do." Could LLM create a new class of local criminals? It is trivial now to setup a website that looks like a legitimate AI business (because AI businesses all have to sound ridiculous to be taken seriously). Creating the assets to make this attack work can be done with a $20/mo Claude account and a local LLM for the dirty bits. It would leave a trail for sure, but I imagine someone that has worked on tracing those trails could come up with an imaginative way to hide just the right things.

I've experienced the "best economy in the history of the US" for the last several years. To me, it looks like we have been in a recession for years, that was before the AI boom. When a massive group of people face drastic and sudden unemployment, which is what it looks like to an aging tech worker like me, I bet at least some of them would consider this. The tech sector has lost more jobs in the last 6 months than in 2025. And, that group has zero North Korean nationals. It might be someone living in a suburb in Phoenix, Arizona that can't pay their mortgage anymore.

Who knows if this attack was seasoned professionals. But, when we talk about AI creating or destroying jobs, couldn't AI create a bunch of "jobs" which are stealing banking credentials on behalf of 55 year olds, no longer able to find jobs in the tech industry?

If nothing else, this feels like it would make a good contemporary sci-fi story.

Anatomy of a Failed (Nation-State?) Attack