Intelligence Report Suggests Cartel Members Enlisted in Ukraine to Learn Drone Warfare
Spotlight | Mexico, Ukraine
Ukraine counterintelligence investigates presence of sicarios on front line
Excerpt:
Ukraine’s domestic intelligence suspects Spanish-speaking volunteers of infiltrating the International Legion to train in flying FPV drones. Some are reportedly linked to cartels and have been recruited through private military companies.
A confidential memo sent recently by Mexico’s National Intelligence Centre (CNI) alerted Ukraine’s SBU counter-intelligence service to the presence of Mexican volunteers suspected of joining the International Legion, not out of ideological conviction but to acquire advanced expertise in drone warfare, particularly in the handling of First-Person View (FPV) kamikaze drones.
At the CNI’s request, the SBU launched an investigation, in coordination with Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence, of several Spanish-speakers who had joined units attached to the second squadron of the GUR’s International Legion, including the Tactical Group Ethos, a semi-clandestine unit operating in the Donbas and Kharkiv oblasts.
Ukrainian investigators suspect that some Mexican and Colombian volunteers are specifically signing up to join FPV academies, circumventing initial checks, to then pass on their skills to transnational criminal organizations.
Organized scientific fraud is growing at an alarming rate, study uncovers
https://phys.org/news/2025-08-scientific-fraud-alarming-uncovers.html
Excerpt:
From fabricated research to paid authorships and citations, organized scientific fraud is on the rise, according to a new Northwestern University study.
By combining large-scale data analysis of scientific literature with case studies, the researchers led a deep investigation into scientific fraud. Although concerns around scientific misconduct typically focus on lone individuals, the Northwestern study instead uncovered sophisticated global networks of individuals and entities, which systematically work together to undermine the integrity of academic publishing.
The problem is so widespread that the publication of fraudulent science is outpacing the growth rate of legitimate scientific publications. The authors argue these findings should serve as a wake-up call to the scientific community, which needs to act before the public loses confidence in the scientific process.
The study, “The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient and growing rapidly,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Science must police itself better in order to preserve its integrity,” said Northwestern’s Luís A. N. Amaral, the study’s senior author.
“If we do not create awareness around this problem, worse and worse behavior will become normalized. At some point, it will be too late, and scientific literature will become completely poisoned. Some people worry that talking about this issue is attacking science. But I strongly believe we are defending science from bad actors. We need to be aware of the seriousness of this problem and take measures to address it.”
.....Amaral and his team uncovered a widespread underground network operating within the shadows and outside of the public’s awareness.
“These networks are essentially criminal organizations, acting together to fake the process of science,” Amaral said. “Millions of dollars are involved in these processes.”
.....After analyzing the data, the team uncovered coordinated efforts involving “paper mills,” brokers and infiltrated journals. Functioning much like factories, paper mills churn out large numbers of manuscripts, which they then sell to academics who want to quickly publish new work.
These manuscripts are mostly low quality—featuring fabricated data, manipulated or even stolen images, plagiarized content and sometimes nonsensical or physically impossible claims.
“More and more scientists are being caught up in paper mills,” Amaral said. “Not only can they buy papers, but they can buy citations. Then, they can appear like well-reputed scientists when they have barely conducted their own research at all.”
.....Amaral, Richardson and their collaborators found fraudulent networks use several key strategies:
Groups of researchers collude to publish papers across multiple journals. When their activities are discovered, the papers are subsequently retracted;
Brokers serve as intermediaries to enable mass publication of fraudulent papers in compromised journals;
Fraudulent activities are concentrated in specific, vulnerable subfields;
Organized entities evade quality-control measures, such as journal de-indexing.
Sometimes these organizations go around established journals altogether, searching instead for defunct journals to hijack. When a legitimate journal stops publishing, for example, bad actors can take over its name or website. These actors surreptitiously assume the journal’s identity, lending credibility to its fraudulent publications, despite the actual publication being defunct.
“This happened to the journal HIV Nursing,” Richardson said. “It was formerly the journal of a professional nursing organization in the U.K., then it stopped publishing, and its online domain lapsed. An organization bought the domain name and started publishing thousands of papers on subjects completely unrelated to nursing, all indexed in Scopus.”
“Brokers connect all the different people behind the scenes,” Amaral said. “You need to find someone to write the paper. You need to find people willing to pay to be the authors. You need to find a journal where you can get it all published. And you need editors in that journal who will accept that paper.”
.....”If we’re not prepared to deal with the fraud that’s already occurring, then we’re certainly not prepared to deal with what generative AI can do to scientific literature,” Richardson said.
“We have no clue what’s going to end up in the literature, what’s going to be regarded as scientific fact and what’s going to be used to train future AI models, which then will be used to write more papers.”
“This study is probably the most depressing project I’ve been involved with in my entire life,” Amaral said. “Since I was a kid, I was excited about science. It’s distressing to see others engage in fraud and in misleading others. But if you believe that science is useful and important for humanity, then you have to fight for it.”