The sheriff is calling them “Uber cheats.”

Florida investigators have charged a pair of Broward County men with a ravenous Uber Eats scam that cost the company more than $1 million.

Trayon Morgan, 21, and Roy Blackwood, 38, allegedly bit off “more than they can chew” when they uncovered a loophole that allowed them to convert prepaid company credit into gift cards by pretending to be both Uber Eats customers and delivery drivers, according to authorities.

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“Morgan used the Uber Eats software application and would act as the customer and the courier,” the Broward County Sheriff’s Office said Friday in a statement. “He would place a grocery order as a consumer for pickup under a fake account, then accept the order as the courier.”

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Then, Uber would provide him with a preauthorized credit of up to $700 per purchase.

However, according to investigators, he would cancel the consumer’s order and spend the credit on a gift card instead.

On one day in January alone, detectives allegedly watched the pair scam Uber out of more than $5,000, buying gift cards at 27 different Walgreens stores.

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“Morgan created several fake accounts to keep the fraud going,” the sheriff’s office alleged. “He would often use stolen and fabricated identities of Uber drivers, using their license information and altering it with his own photo.”

Morgan and Blackwood have been charged with organized scheme to defraud and grand theft.

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The U.S. housing market may be stuck in a prolonged freeze.

Fannie Mae economists projected in a revised forecast that stagnation in the housing market could last into 2024, whether the economy avoids a recession or not.

“Regardless of whether a soft landing is achieved over the coming year, we expect existing home sales to stay subdued and within a tight range,” they wrote.

Existing home sales have already tumbled 2.2% in July from the previous month to an annual rate of 4.07 million units, according to new data released Tuesday by the National Association of Realtors. On an annual basis, sales of previously owned homes are down 16.6% when compared with the same time last year.

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The slowdown in sales is largely due to the meteoric rise in mortgage rates, which surged to a fresh two-decade high this week. Freddie Mac reported that rates on the popular 30-year fixed mortgage surged to 7.23% this week, well above the 5.55% rate recorded one year ago and the pre-pandemic average of 3.9%. 

It marks the highest level for rates since 2001.

In addition to locking out many consumers due to affordability constraints, the spike in mortgage rates is fueling another problem in the housing market: limited supply. 

That’s because sellers who locked in a low mortgage rate before the pandemic began have been reluctant to sell with rates continuing to hover near a two-decade-high, leaving few options for eager would-be buyers. 

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The number of available homes on the market at the end of July was down by more than 9% from the same time last year and down 46% from the typical amount before the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, according to a recent report from Realtor.com.

“With an ongoing tight supply of existing homes for sale and the recent rise in 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rate to around 7%, we expect home sales in 2023 to remain near the lowest annual level since 2009,” Fannie Mae economists said. 

Even if the economy skirts a recession this year, the affordability constraints in the housing market are likely to continue due to the ongoing limited supply of homes for sale, they added. 

And in the event of an economic downturn, mortgage rates may fall “somewhat,” the analysis suggests, but the housing market would likely face problems from a weakening labor market and a tightening of credit conditions – in addition to increased consumer pessimism. 

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“We therefore do not anticipate a meaningful recovery in existing home sales over our forecast horizon under any of the more likely scenarios,” Fannie Mae said.

Although there is growing optimism that the economy will avert a recession, Fannie Mae economists still expect to see a downturn in 2024, with real GDP sliding 0.2% year over year by the fourth quarter. 

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The rise of powerful new generative artificial intelligence technologies are already making lots of jobs more efficient, and fresh data indicates hacking is one of them.

Check Point Research’s 2023 Mid-Year Cyber Security Report released in recent days found there was an 8% spike in global cyberattacks in the second quarter of the year – the most significant increase in two years – and the analysts blame the surge on a combination of activities, including the misuse of generative AI tools.

The study conducted by the threat intelligence arm of Check Point Software Technologies said ransomware groups have elevated their game, the use of USB devices to infect organizations has seen a resurgence, “hacktivism” by politically motivated groups is up, and AI misuse has been juiced up thanks to criminals using the new tools to develop phishing emails, keystroke monitoring malware, and craft ransomware code.

Dane Sherrets is senior solutions architect at HackerOne, a security platform that connects businesses with ethical hackers who help organizations find vulnerabilities in their systems before the bad guys do, and says he is not surprised at all that AI is driving up cybercrimes because it makes attackers much more productive. He knows that, he says, because he uses ChatGPT every day to speed up his own work.

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Beyond advising clients on best practices at HackerOne, Sherrets spends his free time as a bug bounty hunter, which essentially involves gaining authorization from companies to try to hack them and find vulnerabilities so they can be fixed. HackerOne even works with the Department of Defense by attempting to run hacks on the Pentagon and the Air Force, which Sherrets’ team assists with.

He explained to FOX Business how hackers are using generative AI tools, and how the situation could evolve in the future.

“What I’ve noticed with AI is it just makes you ten times more productive at whatever you’re doing – for an attacker, that could be writing code,” he said. “So instead of me needing to write like fifty lines of code and trying to figure out exactly how to work [it out], which could take me hours, I can just ask an API [application programming interface] to generate that code for me. That takes me five seconds, and the code will sometimes work right out of the box.”

WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?

Sherrets says prior to generative AI tools becoming available to the public, scammers had to spend a great deal of time creating customized spearphishing emails posing as company executives to gain privileged information. But now, they can write perfectly customized emails at scale using tools like ChatGPT because of the data available to the apps and their ability to draft sophisticated copy.

Sherrets says major AI companies like Google and Microsoft are getting better at cracking down on hackers that try to manipulate their models for misuse, but he himself has found ways to fool the systems into giving him information a hacker should not be granted access to. He believes future danger could lie in open source models from other developers who are not concerned with how their generative AI tools are used. 

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“People going after hackers are going to become more efficient with this so it is going to be sort of this battle,” he said. “The bad guys eventually are going to be able to have these systems of their own without those restrictions.”

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U.S. consumers have embraced former President Donald Trump’s mugshot to the tune of millions of dollars in spending on T-shirts and other paraphernalia.

Trump surrendered to authorities in Georgia on Thursday, resulting in a now-famous mugshot being sold on partisan swag both celebrating and condemning the incident.

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., advertised “Free Trump” merchandise on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, shortly after Trump’s arrest.

“Free Trump Merch! To be clear all profits from this on my Web Store are going to be donated to the Legal Defense Fund to fight the tyranny & insanity we’re seeing before us. Unlike many, I won’t try to profit from this but will do what I can to help,” Trump Jr. wrote.

Trump’s campaign would go on to raise $7.1 million between the release of his mugshot on Thursday and Saturday afternoon. Trump’s team said they raked in $4.18 million on Friday, which was the highest grossing day of the entire campaign.

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Once Trump was taken into custody, the campaign started selling shirts, posters, bumper stickers and beverage coolers, all with Trump’s mugshot.

The items also include the tagline, “NEVER SURRENDER!”

Ranging from $12 to $34, the items available include a bumper sticker, a coffee mug, koozies in black and white, and short-sleeve and long-sleeve shirts in black and white.

TRUMP CAMPAIGN RELEASES ‘NEVER SURRENDER’ MERCHANDISE WITH FORMER PRESIDENT’S MUGSHOT

All eight items feature Trump’s mugshot, the “NEVER SURRENDER!” tagline and the Trump 2024 Make America Great Again logo.

On the other side of the aisle, the anti-Trump Lincoln Project is selling $55 sets of six shot glasses featuring the mugshot and the letters “FAFO” beneath, which stands for “f–k around and find out.” Etsy, the crafts website, has dozens of mocking products, including a Taylor Swift concert t-shirt parody.

Fox Business’ Elizabeth Pritchett and Reuters contributed to this report.

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Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt is pushing to provide relief for residents by slashing some state taxes. 

“We believe in smaller government, lower taxes. That’s first and foremost, and we have built the largest savings account in our state’s history. In Oklahoma, since I’ve been governor, we have a budget surplus. So now is the time to give that back to the people,” Gov. Stitt said on “Varney & Co” Tuesday. 

The Republican leader noted which state taxes he hopes to get cut back.

“We want to get rid of income tax, get that to zero. We want to be the most business-friendly state in the country.”

STATE INCOME TAXES: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW

Only eight states in the country do not have a personal income tax for taxpayers. These include Wyoming, Washington, Texas, South Dakota, Alaska, Nevada, Florida and Tennessee. 

Other states such as New Hampshire only have interest and dividend teases, not direct income tax from an individual personal annual wage, and Pennsylvania has a flat tax rate of 3.07%, making it one of the lowest tax rates in the nation.

Currently, Oklahoma’s state income tax rate is at 4.75%.

“This last session. I called for a 75-point reduction to get it down into the threes. You do that, when you have a budget surplus, so it just makes common sense. You either raise expenses or you cut revenue. And so I’m not going to put our core services at risk. But with surplus, we should give that back to the citizens of Oklahoma. That’s what I’m advocating for.”

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Gov. Stitt is advocating for bringing the tax down to zero, like Florida or Texas. 

“If you look at the states that are really growing, and Oklahoma’s economy is booming right now, but it could be going even better if we would start lowering that. And I’m not saying you do it overnight, but as revenue increases, you take part of that revenue and you can grow modestly some things. CPI index, you can grow some expenses, but you have to lower a quarter of a point at a time. And over the next decade, you can put your state on the path to zero. And that’s my effort. That’s what I’m trying to get down through the legislature.”

In addition to the income tax, Gov. Stitt also said he hopes to reduce the state grocery tax.

“We’re one of only 12 states that taxes groceries, and I’m trying to eliminate that because of the inflation and the harm that it’s costing everyday Americans, everyday Oklahomans. We’re trying to give them some relief at the grocery store as well.”

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Accoding to the most recent inflation data, prices climbed 3.2% from last July, up from 3% in June but slightly below the 3.3% forecast from Refinitiv economists. It marked the first acceleration in the headline figure in more than a year, underscoring the challenge of taming high inflation.

The July consumer price index (CPI) report showed food prices, a visceral reminder of inflation for many Americans, also inched higher in July. Grocery costs rose 0.3% last month and are up 3.6% compared with the same time last year.

FOX Business’ Megan Henney and Phillip Nieto contributed to this report.

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