Mexico's Cartel Shakedown Deepfakes

My phone blew up Sunday with messages from friends and family outside Mexico asking if I was safe.

At first, I was confused. I’m roughly a 30-hour drive from Puerto Vallarta, where cartel leader El Mencho was killed and several fires were set in retaliation.

My social feeds were filled with burning cars, airport chaos, and influencers narrating events in real time from the ground. For a moment, I wondered: Should I be worried?

But in Puerto Morelos, it was a normal Sunday. People were at the beach. Cafés were open. Life was humming along at its usual pace.

About 30 minutes away in Playa del Carmen, friends told me things were calm, aside from a few vehicles that had been set on fire. No one was inside them. An OXXO burned in Tulum, along with a couple of cars on the highway.

Concerning? Yes.

A mass exodus of foreigners fleeing for their lives? No.

Some temporary curfews were put in place. As of today, the Puerto Vallarta airport has reopened, and most businesses are operating as usual.

From where I’m sitting, the scale of the online reaction didn’t match the on-the-ground reality in this region.

That raises a larger question: Are we witnessing coordinated disinformation, algorithmic amplification, or simply what happens when dramatic optics travel faster than context?

The Spiral team is currently based in Mexico, Belize, and Colombia. This week, in the HyperFix breakdown, we’re unpacking what was confirmed, what was exaggerated, and what it means to consume crisis content in the AI era.

I’m convinced that founder-led marketing is going to be the go-to strategy in the age of AI. That’s because when the world becomes more saturated with bots, connecting with the story of a founder who is building in public feels real and genuine. Beehiiv founder Tyler Denk pretty much owns the playbook on this strategy. He unpacked it in this interview with Grow Letter founder Matt McGarry recently.

Two years ago, he started his own newsletter, Big Desk Energy, and grew it to 120,000 subscribers. It now brings in $25k in advertising each month alone. Some of his strategies include:

✅ Incentive-based subscriber referrals such as gifting Beehiiv’s Series B Pitch deck to whoever drove two new signups to his newsletter.

✅ Following new subscribers on social media and sending personalized messages.

✅ Sharing what others may consider “trade secrets” and showing behind the scenes of his newsletter company.

He even created a Chatbot clone that answers questions and it works because it a) sounds like him and b) has been trained to provide valuable answers about list growth, ads, and email newsletters.

This is not to be confused with using Chatbot autoresponders that give your prospects the ick. If you’re wanting to add automations, the Spiral team and I broke down the difference between a Chatbot that hurts your personal brand versus one that turbo charges it.

A few weeks ago there was a massive data leak by Chat & Ask AI, a popular app on Google Play and the Apple store, that exposed the private messages of hundreds of users.

Oddly enough, this gained very little media attention. 404 Media reported that the issue was a misconfiguration in the app’s usage of Google Firebase, which makes it easy for anyone to become an “authenticated” user and access the backend where data is stored.

But that’s not all! The data researcher who exposed this vulnerability created a tool that automatically scans Google Play and Apple App stores. He found that 103 out of 200 iOS apps had this same issue, exposing tens of millions of stored files.

My take: Everywhere I look these days, there’s another story of how data has been breached, stolen, sold or harvested. And it seems like resources and better alternatives are scarce. The question we should be asking: Why won’t Google address these widely-known security risks? Where are the regulations for ensuring data is protected? Either we stop using these apps, or we put pressure on companies and lawmakers to enforce better standards.

✨ AI KOOL-AID

Offline is the new luxury. This may be the biggest status symbol flex as people want to get away from the constant infiltration of online stimuli and distractions. I’m attending The New Media Summit this week in Austin, Texas, and laptops are prohibited in the conference space—not to take notes, multitask, or do anything else. The conference is sold out with in-person events, dinners, coffee tours, networking happy hours and over 500 people attending.

I’ve also been following this trend of people turning their homes into coffee shops (one of my own personal dreams!) and I can’t help but wonder if we’ll also be designing third spaces where people can make more rea- life connections.

I’m also planning a workcation with some of my remote team members and sharing an Airbnb with a team of editors I’m building for an ed-tech startup next month. I think we are truly emerging out of the pre-pandemic haze of everything online all the time and coming back to an era when people not only want connection, but are more willing to build community and create valuable in-person experiences.

How are you getting off the screen and using your time to reduce your digital footprint?

🔥 EXTRA HYPE

• OpenAI partners with major consulting firms to create AI coworkers 

• These AI brand aesthetics are gorg 

• ChatGPT’s 5.2 model makes gains

• Creepy or cool? Giving birth to your AI self 

• Chinese labs accused of siphoning data from Claude 

• This AI doomsday scenario is going viral and getting backlash

• What happens when agents go rogue

📨 P.S. If you are building a newsletter and want to eliminate the weekly scramble, that is exactly what we help our customers do.

 👉 Book a consult with our team

And if this sparked something, forward it to an AI-curious friend.