News
884 Scam Pages Unearthed In $280K Global Investment Scam
Links to the pages were shown in Facebook ads purchased by fraudsters, who lured users into making fake investments in market-leading companies.
Group-IB, a global cybersecurity firm working alongside the UAE Cybersecurity Council, has published new research outlining an international fake investment scam that significantly impacted social media users in the Middle East.
Experts from Group-IB’s Digital Risk Protection team discovered 884 scam pages with traffic coming from Facebook advertisements purchased by the fraudsters. The social media campaign offered users the opportunity to invest in one of 35 market-leading firms, including legitimate financial, insurance, transportation, oil, gas, and construction companies.
Group-IB researchers found English, Arabic, and Spanish Facebook ads. In Arabic-language advertisements, scammers enticed individuals with bold claims that they could “earn millions” by investing “a mere $200” amount.
If a user clicked on an ad, they were redirected to a scam page containing legitimate branding from a prominent company, along with a request for their name, email address, and phone number.
After filling out the form, users would receive daily emails claiming to be from a trading portal. Users would be urged to deposit funds into the fake trading account to begin buying stocks. The scammers would even resort to phone calls if a user didn’t respond. The elaborate con also requested bank details, ID, and passport copies.
Also Read: The Largest Data Breaches In The Middle East
“Retail investing is becoming increasingly popular among individuals who are looking for ways to diversify their income. This particular scam is notable as the cybercriminals leverage multiple communication channels, such as email and direct phone calls, as part of their social engineering efforts. We urge individuals to never share personal information or money with third parties unless you are certain of their legitimacy,” said Sharef Hlal, Head of Group-IB’s MEA Digital Risk Protection Analytics Team.
In total, 60% of the scam pages targeted users from the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region. Based on Group-IB’s research, the criminal campaign is thought to have caused $280,000 in financial damages between March and June 2023.
News
UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
The lean Emirati-built language model beats larger global systems and puts Arabic at the center of training.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has released an Arabic-first large language model that tops global test boards, an uncommon edge for a region long served by English-centric systems.
Falcon-H1 Arabic comes in 3B, 7B and 34B versions. The flagship posts 75.36% accuracy on comprehensive Arabic tasks and ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. It also outperforms Meta’s Llama-70B and Alibaba’s Qwen-72B while using less than half their parameters. The smallest model beats Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by ten percentage points on equivalent benchmarks.
Arabic remains hard territory for AI. Flexible word order, dense morphology and constant switching between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic leave many global models missing context or tone. Academic research has pointed to a shortage of annotated datasets for dialect and informal speech. The impact shows up in classrooms, call centers and government portals where Arabic chatbots lag their English counterparts.
TII trained Falcon-H1 Arabic on formal writing, dialects and culturally grounded content. Beyond scores, it handles practical use: long conversations, reasoning rather than literal translation, and inputs of up to 192,000 words — enough for medical records or legal filings.
“The aim is innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council.
Also Read: Governata Raises $4M For Saudi AI Data-Governance Push
Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across over 20 countries, yet has often been treated as a secondary language for foundation models. The UAE move signals a push to flip that logic and build Arabic-native stacks rather than wait for global systems to improve.
Falcon models have led their categories since 2023. With H1 Arabic, TII is offering free access via chat.falconllm.tii.ae for developers, media, healthcare and public-sector users looking to automate in natural Arabic.
As the region continues to invest in sovereign computing and data localization, the addition of Falcon-H1 Arabic adds a powerful tool built for the native language, instead of an afterthought attached to an English-trained system.
UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
UAE Users Sleep Less, But More Efficiently, ŌURA Data Reveals
Governata Raises $4M For Saudi AI Data-Governance Push
Zoho Opens First UAE Data Centers For Local Cloud Solutions
EDT&Partners Buys eFlow To Bolster AI Learning Push
Clicks Bets On Physical Keyboards With CES 2026 Launch
Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra Leaks Point To February 2026 Reveal
Belkin Launches Wireless HDMI Adapter With 131-Foot Range
Syria Rolls Out First National Tourism Discount Card
