thousands of people have taken part in protests across europe against coronavirus—related restrictions. it comes as a third wave of infections forced millions more in the eu back into lockdown. in istanbul, thousands took to the streets after turkey pulled out of an international treaty aimed at preventing violence against women and girls. the government there says existing laws already offer protection but the main opposition party says abandoning the treaty keeps women as second class citizens, leaving them to be killed. the premier of new south wales has pleaded with residents to heed evacuation warnings as life—threatening flash floods threaten australia's most populous state. thousands of people have been told to leave their homes. the floods have been caused by record rainfall with the bad weather set to continue until as late as thursday.

now on bbc news, click this week — beating the covid scammers. and anyone for robot tennis? welcome to click. i would like to share with you some personaljoy, if i may. i was getting ready to film the programme this morning when i got the best text message that i think i've received in years, inviting me to get my first dose of the vaccine. congratulations. i presume you acted on it.

yeah, sure did. took about three or four clicks, ithink, and i booked in for later this afternoon so it was easy. i did that and then i had a big cry. well, i was so worried when i spoke to you first thing this morning — you were so upset — but now i know they were tears of joy. yeah, i mean, i might go again — just to warn you — but this, this feeling of relief and possibly a release of pent—up emotions from the last year, i don't know what it was, but it happened, let's just say that. but here's the thing, right? before i confirmed, ifound myself looking at this text and thinking "is this genuine?" now, i checked the website that it sent me to and it did and in .nhs.uk, so it was all fine, but these are the times we are living in, where scammers target world events and take advantage of people's fears. and by genuine coincidence, this is what we're talking this the royal united services institute says that cyber scams reached epidemic levels during the pandemic. dan simmons has been finding out more.

preparing for a dawn raid. as soon as the door is breached, they will go in and then there will be a slight pause. officers are on their way to a terraced house in north london. this is the city of london police force's 10th raid against covid scammers this year alone. operation parasite is aiming to seize evidence before devices can be locked or destroyed. police! police with a warrant! a red box is flung out of a bedroom window — it seems the suspect has something to hide. but it's what the cops will find inside the house that makes them certain they have their man. that's a sim file, so it is essentially one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight mobile phones and it is used by the fraudsters to send messages. specialist equipment housing multiple sim cards is designed to fire out thousands of texts

at a time in a type of fraud known as sms fishing, or �*smishing'. officers are now bagging up anything they believe could be evidence — phones, computers and the like. they've also have access to a digital dog that can sniff out this sort of equipment. just like a drug dog, fred has been trained to recognise the smell of materials used to make digital equipment. whether it's raiding a house or simply taking a website offline, police are now closing down 2,500 covid scams like this every single month in the uk. 30,000 campaigns have been stopped in the last year. but that doesn't mean that these often sophisticated cons are not working, partly because of the way our lives have changed. one line of attack has been to focus on the massive

increase in home shopping. all those parcels have to be delivered, right? it was last autumn and i'd been doing quite a bit of online shopping. anyway, i got this text message through from courierfirm dpd, asking me to rearrange a parcel delivery. like thousands of other people, i would have gone online and left some details but i did not because it was not dpd, it was fraudsters. and the only reason i knew — because it was pretty convincing — was i had been in all day. the black friday sales started and i decided to purchase a lovely coat that i really wanted to buy for a very, very long time. anna was not so lucky and is so worried about being targeted again, we've agreed not to use her real name. when she received an email saying her coat needed to be realising it was a fake website. she immediately told her

bank about the fraud and cancelled her card. i actually thought "now i have nothing to worry about. everything is fine and, you know, case closed." a few days later, she received a call from the phone number on the back of her bank card. man: we have detected fraud on your account. l we'lljust need to take a few pieces of security information to get this sorted out. ok, thanks for that. i can see that while we have been talking, your account has taken out a £9,000 loan. was that you? right. in that case, we'll need you to transfer that money back into our account. we'll give you the account number and sort code now. with the information she'd given them, the crooks had taken out a £9,000 loan into anna's account and were now trying to finish thejob by talking her into sending the money onto them. then i thought "ok, just give me the account number and sort code". so i still felt quite suspicious and i decided to google the sort code that they gave me and to see what that might come up with.

then it came up with a completely different account, different bank. i said "you know what? i'm going to hang up right now and i'm just gonna call you back." and this is when theyjust started panicking a lot and they were like "no, no, no!" like, "don't hang up! don't hang up! the longer the money are out somewhere, the more likely that they are just gonna be used by fraudsters." anna then called her bank and realised the scammers had come back to hit her again. she closed that account, changed her email address and mobile number in a bid to escape the crooks. she still does not feel safe. i know i did not lose any money but it did feel like a real burglary, to be honest. i did not feel like that was — that was the end, because there was still a lot of my information out there that fraudsters can potentially try and use, and i don't know if they're gonna to use it now or in two months�* time or in two years�* time. that particular fraud netted nearly £250,000 last year. the true figure is probably much higher,

due to under—reporting. in fact, during the pandemic, the uk service the cyber helpline saw an increase of 366% in the number of people seeking support after being a victim of cyber crime. only a quarter of those had already reported the crime to the police. detective chief inspector martina elliott helps lead the fight against fraud on a national level. the different types of fraud that we have seen have dramatically shifted. for example, online shopping fraud has gone up by 43%, which is a huge leap. we saw a definite increase in smishing after the december rollout for the covid vaccine, where we received over 1000 reports in one week. they are taking advantage at the most horrendous time. people at the moment have — are short of money, people have lost employment, they've lost jobs, they are vulnerable, and these despicable people are taking advantage of all of those things. it's reprehensible.

back at the morning raid, and 21—year—old ty gallagher has been arrested. officers find scripts on a smartphone, designed to trick victims into revealing personal information, messages with associates about the most effective ploys... they're saying they use this to make more money. ..and lists of numbers which can all be targeted at the press of a button. so that that will just send — bombard these with fake messages. i mean, can you see many that is. and all this can be done from just sitting in your bedroom with a laptop and a mobile phone. two days after his arrest, he pleads guilty to two charges relating to fraud. he's awaiting sentencing. it's estimated that a third of charities suffered a cyber

attack between the start of the pandemic and november last year as remote working made online security more difficult. among them isjonathan�*s outfit charity digital, which ironically works to help other charities make better use of online. like many workplaces over the last year, they've gone from this to this. but did working from home play a key role in opening them up to a successful attack — an attack that happened earlier this year. hackers had started sending malicious code from an employee's e—mail. they'd been poking around the network for over a week. they had actually been sending sort of emails to business partners of ours with modified invoice and bank details on to try and basically defraud the partners, or defraud us, of the money that was owed to us. do you think that with more people working from home, that made your organisation

more vulnerable? definitely. it's much harder to check that something is coming in is genuine, and then if you have been penetrated and your e—mail account — which is what happened here — is behaving oddly, it's really hard to get that checked. but i really want to start by saying we are really sorry that this has happened. the charity hosted a webinar to explain what happened and alert those affected. although charity digital did not lose any money directly, jonathan estimates the cost of dealing with the attack ran into five figures. but perhaps the most worrying attacks over the past year have been the ones targeting the uk's ability to manage and counter the spread of the pandemic itself. four years ago, the wannacry ransomware attack brought the nhs to a standstill for several days, with attackers seizing control of hospital systems and demanding payments. the man in charge of protecting the uk's hospitals, vaccine research and rollout other key infrastructure has been desperate to avoid a repeat.

one of the things that we learned very early on was that the organisations, the businesses that supplied our hospitals, supplied the work behind the vaccine, all of those became critical, and so there is still potentially a target for states and criminals. the ncsc has told click that the number of high—level incidents against key coronavirus—related targets like the nhs and vaccine development is happening around the clock, at around 30 every month. but none of them are believed to have affected the nhs�* response. there's certainly been no service disruption or impact i mean, obviously, you know, it's hard to be — always be confident of everything, because you don't see everything. but have any been successful against any other critical systems ?

well, there unfortunately have been a number of successful ransomware attacks against businesses. i can think of roughly about ten that we've — that would be again, we deal with a number of ransomware cases — unfortunately, far too many — but about ten have been — it could have been considered part of the supply chain. meanwhile, the problem of fraud, particularly during the pandemic, continues relentlessly. we are never going to be able to arrest our way out of fraud because the levels are rising. technology enables fraudsters, so it is on the increase and it is likely to continue to increase. hopefully, we are keeping pace and we are dealing with it and we will continue to keep pace with it. the level of fraud has jumped over the past five years and now, the pandemic has allowed scammers to prey on fears and uncertainty. officers admit that perhaps the most effective weapon against all of this is for us to adopt a sort of new normal and double check any message that asks us for our details. that was dan.

now, obviously, getting a text inviting you for your vaccination is a massive deal. and as i said, i checked that the website i was being sent to ended in the official .nhs.uk. and once i was there, i was not asked for any other details, apart from my date of birth. but that might be different for you where you are, so our general advice is... check it sends you to an official website that you recognise it and nothing is misspelled. if you are asked for your bank details or any other information, get suspicious. just a note that by clicking on the text, you are not automatically going to be handing over your bank details — itjust means that you are likely to be asked for them soon. and if you are suspicious, you can contact the organisation which sent you the message independently. and if you're in the uk, you can forward any text

messages to 7726 — that spells the word spam — so the police can investigate and reply to you as to whether it is genuine or not. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week facebook agreed to pay news corp australia for its journalism, following a world—first law to make tech platforms pay for news content. uber said it would pay uk drivers a minimum wage, holiday pay and pensions after it lost a legal battle around workers' rights. and google and headspace launched a series of children's mindfulness videos to help combat stress around online learning, social distancing and screen time. canadian researchers are developing an exoskeleton that uses al to see and react in real—time. where other assistive systems typically use manual controls, this combines computer vision and deep learning to adjust movements in relation to its surroundings. from two legs to four, this robot in norway

is using machine learning to shape—shift. this droid's limbs can be short, stable and slow, or tall, fast and nimble, for example to step over objects. sensors and camera vision inform its decisions by tracking and analysing its terrain. and finally, a russian firm is helping robots to look more human. robot maker promobot showed off its new department, dedicated to making realistic robot skins. the r&d arm houses polymer specialists, artists and 3d modellers. it's getting harder to tell who's a robot and who isn't. makes robot noises. now, as we saw earlier, police forces are targeting scammers at their homes. but there are also online vigilantes who are fighting back, and one of them is utilising artificial intelligence to tackle telephone fraud. omar mehtab has been

finding out more. this is kitboga, he is a twitch streamer, a youtuber, and a scam baiter. what is a scam baiter? well, they trick and waste time of scam callers who try to steal money from unsuspecting innocent people over the phone. scam baiting seems to be getting more and more popular, with videos flooding social media. i mean, ifound kitboga on tiktok. usually, kitboga operates by himself, but now him and a few others from the scam baiting community are creating

an artificial intelligence bot to waste scammers' time. using speech recognition, it can work out what a scammer is saying to them over the phone and respond with some set statements. and it can keep on going on and on, until the scammer finally recognises that it is talking to a bot. if i could keep them on the phone for an hour, that was an hour they weren't talking to someone else. right? like, i wanted to get out there and do something. whenever i got those dozen inbound phone calls every day, like, i can't answer all of them, so if ijust forward those to an ai, and even if it only wasted ten, 20 minutes,

that adds up. while kitboga can, and has, wasted up to 37 hours of a scammer�*s time, this a! at its current stage can do that for about 30 minutes before they realise. so this a! is responding with set statements and is using kitboga's own voice to speak. but in the future, he hopes for the al to create its own synthesised voices and use machine learning to pick up what a scammer is saying to them, and come up with their own response. i swear the ai said that exact same line, like 50 times in this one call. i really do think we can get it to a point we can allow people, like, if they get a scam call, they could just forward it right over to one of these ais. the tricky part would be, like, you don't want them forwarding their mother—in—law�*s number or something. laughs. but yeah, i think itjust

being more autonomous or automated, just doing its thing, i think that would be funny, you know? laughs. we'll see. so, what is it like being on the receiving end of this ai, and actually having your own time wasted? let's find out. david is not here. can i take your gift card codes? no, you can't talk to him. he's not here right now. sorry? what did she say? laughs. where would you like to fly to? laughs. they're trying to say new york! as you can see, the ai does have some teething problems, but it's still in its early stages and they are hoping

the next big iteration of this will be available later on in the year. for the last couple of months, these courts have been empty. but from 29 march, play can resume again. i'm really looking forward to getting back to playing tennis and today, i'm going to be testing out some tech to help if you are playing solo, to capture your performance and even improve your game. if you have no tennis partner, you can still play with the slinger bag. this portable tennis ball launcher and its attached oscillator costs £780. it started as a kickstarter campaign and is now a good solution for socially distant tennis. the bag is quite large, but is designed to fit in a car boot, with a removable battery. once charged, it lasts up to five hours. speed, frequency and feed rate of the balls can all be

adjusted and operated by remote control from across the court. it holds up to 144 tennis balls at one time. we are using just over 70 for our practice. so this is the oscillation mode. starting again. laughs. now it's time to collect the balls. there's no automated collection of balls but the slinger does come with — whoops — this very handy telescopic tube, which makes it a lot easier to collect. i have seen many machines, they are various sizes, but the slinger is very unique, it is portable and very easy to carry. with the other machines, you have to have wires,

long cables, and in terms of health and safety wise, this is a brilliant, brilliant idea. capturing all of this action has been the ava, or automated videoing assistant. it connects your smartphone via bluetooth and follows you as you move around the court. this is a prototype of the device which will be available in the autumn. it also started on kick—starter. the ava has nine speeds, and rotates in 2.5 seconds, fully charged it has ten hours of battery life. my background's from tennis and i wanted to create something that would capture video footage easily for people who wanted to submit their footage to their tennis coaches. other features include automatic zoom tracking and this isight module attachment, which connects to apps like zoom and tiktok. that's still in first prototype, you screw it on, and that does the machine learning on itself, which means that anything mounted to it has auto tracking capability,

effectively being piggybacked onto the isight module. after three months away, it will be great to get back to playing tennis, with or without a human partner. that's it from us for now. as ever, you can keep up with the team on social media — find us on youtube, instagram, facebook and twitter at @bbcclick. thanks for watching, and we'll see you soon. bye— bye. hello there. most parts of the country are going to have a dry day on sunday with some sunshine at times. on saturday, the sunshine was focused more across eastern scotland and the north—east of england, and temperatures reached 17 celsius at bridlington, 18 in aboyne, aberdeenshire

after a frosty start. quite a bit colder in merseyside and kent. those areas may get a little bit milder during sunday but we're not expecting 17 celsius because that warmth was ahead of this weak weather front here that's been bringing some thicker cloud and a little drizzle southwards. but once that moves through, it actually introduces cooler air, a different sort of air mass. so, temperatures won't be quite as high on sunday despite the fact that there will be more sunshine more widely. and by the time we get to the morning, temperatures could be close to freezing where we've got those clearer skies around lothian, fife and tayside. we still have some more cloud and some damp weather across south wales and the south west of england to move away and it should brighten up here in the afternoon. still quite cloudy in the far north of scotland, a bit damp as well. but elsewhere we should see some sunshine coming through from time to time. and the winds, they should be quite light as well but remember, the area is a bit cooler on sunday. so, temperatures are typically 10—12 celsius, may be lower than that in norfolk with the onshore

breeze and also in the far north of scotland. but high pressure is keeping it quiet throughout the weekend and into the beginning of next week keeping these weather fronts at bay in from the atlantic. so, we're looking at cloud again and how much there will be and i think many places will see a little sunshine at times on monday. always more cloud towards the north—west. with the breeze picking a little bit up here, there could be some drizzle in the north—west of scotland but again temperatures aren't changing very much. typically 11—12 celsius, that's near normal for this time of the year. and moving quickly onto tuesday, it's a similar sort of picture. again, some sunshine in many areas, a fair bit of cloud around too, mind you. you'll probably notice a stronger breeze, i think, on tuesday. similar sort of temperatures and rain's not far away from the north—west. now, that band of rain on a very weak weather front will push its way eastwards tuesday night and into wednesday, and then pressure will fall and we're looking at our weather to come in from the atlantic. so that means it's going to eventually turn more unsettled — later on in the week i suspect, and as you can see, most of the wetter weather will be towards the north—west of the uk. there won't be much rain

at all in the south—east.

this is bbc news — welcome if you're watching here in the uk or around the globe. i'm mark lobel. our top stories: thousands of people take part in protests across europe, against coronavirus lockdown measures. demonstrations in istanbul as turkey's criticised for pulling out of a treaty protecting women and girls. tu rkey�*s turkey's main opposition party has put it like this: women will be kept as second—class citizens and left to be killed. homes washed away in australia as heavy rain and flash floods batter the east coast, thousands of people are ordered to evacuate. and, coming to life after 800 years, a volcano erupts 30 kilometres outside iceland's capital reykjavic.