Snippings

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An expert has been accused of signing off fire safety certificates for flats in high-rise blocks using the credentials and signature of another engineer without permission, the BBC has been told.
Adam Kiziak has been under investigation for potential malpractice by the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE) – which suspended him in August 2024.
However, Mr Kiziak’s company is understood to have continued to sign off safety certificates since then.
Lenders, including NatWest and Nationwide, are now withdrawing mortgage offers to people hoping to buy flats with fire safety certificates issued by Mr Kiziak’s company, Tri Fire.

From: Suspended engineer accused of forging fire safety certificates for high-rise flats – BBC News.

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The coalition is now pushing the Trump administration to develop a digital identity strategy that involves the government playing a “more direct role in addressing deficiencies in digital identity infrastructure that are leading to massive fraud and cybercrime in both the public and private sectors,” according to the letter.

From: Industry coalition presses DOGE to act on digital identity.

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In a post last week on social media site LinkedIn, David Birch, a fintech commentator and Virgin Money customer, shared a picture of his online conversation with the bank in which he asked: “I have two ISAs with Virgin Money, how do I merge them?”

The bank’s customer service tool responded: “Please don’t use words like that. I won’t be able to continue our chat if you use this language,” suggesting that it deemed the word “virgin” inappropriate.

From: Virgin Money chatbot scolds customer who typed ‘virgin’.

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This is different from publicly traded securities, so it’s the obvious risk that anyone now could just buy Trump’s or Melania’s meme coin as a way to indirectly fund the administration or Trump himself or whoever’s behind these coins in a very opaque way,” Carter said.

From: Trump’s meme coins spark debate over crypto and ethics.

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This is not a difficult position to justify. There is no cash in my wallet and there has not been for some time. It turns out that I am hardly alone in this respect. A recent poll in the UK found that half the people surveyed said they only carried a wallet to store non-payment cards such as driving licences and loyalty cards (and that’s without taking into account the fact that payment cards themselves are an identity product and not money in any sense of the word). In fact, a third of 18-24 year olds say that the digital wallet on their phone is already their preferred way to pay and more than half would rather just carry their phone in place of a wallet or purse.

From: The Wallet Wars Are Not About Money, They Are About Identity.

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A National Crime Agency investigation showed that http://www.OTP.Agency (one-time passcode) was run by Callum Picari, 23, from Hornchurch, Essex; Vijayasidhurshan Vijayanathan, 21, from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire; and Aza Siddeeque, 19, from Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.

Criminals were charged a monthly subscription fee for a service which allowed them to access personal bank accounts and other accounts online to commit account takeover, fraud and steal money.

A basic package costing £30 a week allowed access to the OTP.Agency spoof call bot, designed to trick victim account holders into disclosing genuine one-time passcodes for their online accounts. This enabled criminals to bypass multifactor authentication on online banking and telecoms platforms, allowing them to access accounts and complete fraudulent transactions.

An elite plan cost £380 per month, which offered both a bespoke ‘free text to speech’ service, where criminals could type any message they wanted an automated call to say, and pre-scripted calls specifically designed by Picari, Vijayasidhurshan and Siddeeque to target customers. Officers recovered scripts for use by criminals pretending to call from BT, Sky, Virgin Media, HMRC, Mastercard and Visa.

From: Trio sentenced for £380 per month crime-as-a-service operation.

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Shops and service firms will not be compelled to accept cash, a government minister has said, despite concerns that millions of vulnerable people rely on it.
Emma Reynolds, the new economic secretary to the Treasury, was pressed on coffee shops, trains and leisure centres excluding people by no longer accepting cash.
But she told MPs on the Treasury Committee that there was no chance of the UK becoming cash-free anytime soon.
She said the government was concentrating on ensuring everyone had access to cash, such as through new banking hubs, and on improving people’s digital skills.
Cash is legal tender in the UK, but businesses are not obliged to serve people who only want to pay with notes and coins.
Some countries, such as Australia, are planning rules that would force essential services to accept cash.
But Ms Reynolds effectively ruled out such a move in the UK.
“We have no plans to regulate businesses – big or small – to compel them to accept cash,” she said.

From: Shops and firms will not be forced to accept cash – BBC News.

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If the government does decide to join euroland, then it should rise to the challenge to make the UK the home of the “hard e-euro”: the euro that exists in electronic form only but is legal tender for certain transactions.

From: We should create an electronic euro | Technology | The Guardian.

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X struck a deal with Visa, the largest U.S. credit card network, to be the first partner for what it is calling the X Money Account, CEO Linda Yaccarino announced in a post on the platform.

She said Visa will enable X users to move funds between traditional bank accounts and their digital wallet and make instant peer-to-peer payments, like with Zelle or Venmo.

From: Elon Musk’s X partners with Visa to offer digital wallet.

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It seems to me that banks should create this new infrastructure because it’s not only a way for banks to save money, it’s also a way for banks to create new products and services that mean new revenue streams. In fact, it could be that digital identity is not simply an additional revenue stream in the future but that identity is bigger than payments to banks.

From: Digital Identity Should Be A Big Business For Banks.

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