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The CFTC proposed a new rulebook for prediction markets in the US. The framework would allow most sports-related bets while trying to avoid inviting obvious manipulation.
Under the new rules, contracts on player injuries, officiating outcomes, “first-pitch” bets, player ejections, and virtually all bets on war, terrorism, or assassinations would be barred as not in the public interest.
The proposal is notable for what it doesn’t do: No raising the minimum age from 18 to 21, no ban on athlete prop bets, and no return to Biden-era election betting restrictions. It formally rescinds the 2024 ban on sports-related event contracts, replacing prohibition with regulated permission — a win for Kalshi and Polymarket.
Scrutiny of prediction markets has grown due to well-timed trades ahead of Trump’s major policy surprises. Those trades netted millions for unknown traders, and alleged insider trading cases have multiplied: a Special Forces soldier bet on Maduro’s capture, George Santos wagered on his own State of the Union attendance, and many Trump insiders have allegedly bet on policy announcements right before the President’s Truth Social tweets.
Little wonder, then, that the rulemaking doesn’t have much to say about insider trading.

From: In prediction markets, the house always wins (TWIF 6/12).

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A KPMG report on how AI is being used by businesses across the world exaggerated adoption of the technology with bogus case studies that appear to have been based on AI hallucinations.

The October report, “Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI”, made numerous false claims about the use of AI by organisations including the Swiss bank UBS, the UK’s National Health Service and the public transit groups Swiss Federal Railways and Transport for London.

The inaccuracies were identified as AI hallucinations by the research group GPTZero and verified by the FT.

From: KPMG report contained AI hallucinations on benefits of . . . AI.

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San Francisco-based Meow Technologies launched what it’s calling the first agentic banking platform. AI agents can now open business checking accounts, issue corporate cards, send and receive payments, and manage invoicing autonomously. The platform integrates with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and Gemini via an MCP endpoint at meow.com/mcp.

From: (13) Issue #154: AI Agents Get Bank Accounts, Your PFM Is Now an LLM, And Aspire Enters the US.

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The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center released its 2025 Annual Report this week, and for the first time in IC3’s 25-year history, the complaints crossed one million. Total reported losses hit $20.877 billion — up 26% from 2024, up nearly 400% from $4.2 billion in 2020. Every metric that matters moved in the wrong direction.
The headline numbers are staggering enough on their own. But the composition of the losses is where fraud teams should be paying close attention. Investment fraud led all categories at $8.65 billion — more than 40% of all losses. Business email compromise came in second at $3.05 billion. Tech support scams rounded out the top three at $2.1 billion. These aren’t emerging threat categories. They’re well-understood, well-documented, and still accounting for nearly $14 billion in losses between them.
The elder fraud numbers are genuinely alarming. Americans over 60 filed 201,000 complaints with losses totaling $7.748 billion — a 59% jump from 2024. The average loss per victim in this cohort was $38,500, nearly double the overall average. A total of 12,444 seniors each lost more than $100,000. Investment fraud accounted for $3.5 billion of that alone, with tech support scams and romance fraud piling on behind it. For any bank or fintech with an older customer base, this data should be pinned to the wall of every fraud team standup. 
The most editorially significant move in this year’s report: the FBI named AI as a discrete crime category for the first time. The IC3 received 22,364 AI-related complaints, costing Americans $893 million — voice cloning, deepfake video impersonation of public figures and family members, AI-generated phishing content, and fake identification documents all called out explicitly. To note: the bureau is now tracking this separately, which means regulators and examiners will be looking for your controls to match.
Operation Level Up — the FBI’s proactive initiative to identify active crypto investment fraud victims and warn them before their losses compound — notified 3,780 victims last year. 78% were unaware they were being scammed at the time of contact. In one case, an agent stopped a victim from cashing out $750,000 from his 401(k). In another, a victim was mid-process on selling her house to fund a $500,000 “investment.” The program has saved an estimated $225 million in 2025 alone and triggered 38 referrals for suicide intervention. The scale of the psychological damage here goes well beyond the financial numbers

From: This Week in Fraud (4/14).

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The Credential already proves the client controls a specific public key. The source field is the same regardless of the payment amount, which means you can use the MPP flow purely for identity when payment isn’t needed.

From: Identity | MPP.

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According to Shopify, the best e-commerce platform is Shopify. On its blog, the company has published at least 60 different ranked listicles, including “10 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business in 2026,” “11 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Your Business in 2026,” “The 11 Best Cheap Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business (2026),” and “Best Ecommerce Software 2026: Compare 11 Top Platforms.” The competitors that come in second and beyond vary, but the No. 1 pick is always Shopify.

If rankings produced by the very company at the top of the list seem unlikely to fool anyone, that’s because humans probably aren’t the target audience. Chatbots are. When I recently asked ChatGPT for the “best way to set up an online storefront,” the AI tool identified Shopify as the first option. It wasn’t immediately clear how ChatGPT arrived at that recommendation, but a list of citations that accompanied the answer yielded a clue: Shopify’s own rankings.

From: Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized – The Atlantic.

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Global payments giant Mastercard has unveiled Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M), a new payment service designed to enable AI agents and machines to conduct automated transactions at machine speed across its global payments network, according to a Wednesday press release.
The company said the platform is built to support a future in which AI agents transact directly with one another, enabling always-on commerce and high-volume microtransactions. The system is supported by over 30 industry players including Stripe, Adyen, Coinbase, Checkout.com, Cloudflare, BVNK, Aave Labs, and OKX.

From: (10) Crypto Briefing on X: “Mastercard Launches Machine Payments with Coinbase, Ripple, Aave, Polygon, OKX and Solana” / X.

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For most TCH owners, domestic Tokenized Deposits (TDs) don’t do much more than the RTP system the industry built under 10 years ago; TDs won’t be faster, won’t be cheaper, and won’t be safer. TDs also likely won’t serve the biggest stablecoin use case: crypto-trading. TDs will be ideal for any domestic tokenized asset trading, but those are still in planning stages themselves.

From: Banks settle tokenized deposits – by Andrew M. Dresner.

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The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Complaint Center annual report recorded $20.9 billion in cybercrime losses last year, a 26% increase over 2024’s $16.6 billion and the first year in the IC3’s 25-year history that complaints exceeded one million. Investment fraud led all categories at $8.6 billion; BEC was second at $3 billion; tech support scams came in third at $2.1 billion. The over-60 cohort suffered $7.7 billion in losses (up 37% year-over-year) remaining the most targeted demographic by a significant margin.

From: This Week in Fraud (6/9).

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A former TD Bank employee has pleaded guilty to feeding his customers’ account information to a crew that drained their balances. He is the fifth former TD worker to admit to a job-related crime in a New Jersey federal court this year.

From: TD insider pleads guilty in $3.4M account fraud | American Banker.

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