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Both customers have requested copies of the ‘selfie’ photos that passed Revolut’s security checks but were told this isn’t possible under data protection laws.

From: Which? issues Revolut bank account takeover fraud warning – Which? News.

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Which? contacted Revolut for comment. It provided a statement for publication but did not explain why it did not react to the highly unusual volume of transfers in both cases and intervene by freezing the accounts. It also did not explain how scammers were able to pass its various security checks, including its ‘selfie’ ID request.

Both customers have requested copies of the ‘selfie’ photos that passed Revolut’s security checks but were told this isn’t possible under data protection laws.

From: Which? issues Revolut bank account takeover fraud warning – Which? News.

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There are those who think, with some degree of justification, that the US uses the dollar, the world’s reserve currency, as a policy tool to effect its diplomatic aims.

From: The US – killing the goose, laying a golden egg?.

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Two years after the White House teased an executive order on identity theft in public benefits during the 2022 State of the Union, such an order hasn’t materialized, leaving stakeholders frustrated at the lack of action to address vulnerabilities and prevent fraudsters from siphoning off government money.

“We continue to work in this area very rigorously across government,” Clare Martorana, the federal chief information officer, told Nextgov/FCW at an event this week when asked about the state of the executive order. “This is top of mind for all of us. We want to make sure that we accelerate people’s use of digital [to access government], but safely, securely.”

The order as it was previewed two years ago was said to be focused on preventing fraud in government benefits programs, which spiked during the pandemic, in part due to identity theft. The Government Accountability Office estimated in September that up to $135 billion in unemployment insurance alone went to bad actors during the pandemic.

From: White House stalls on digital identity mandate, despite billions in fraud – Nextgov/FCW.

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There’s an interesting 2022 paper about this from Valdimir Mukharlyamov and Natasha Sarin at the UPenn Law School. The paper, “Price Regulation in Two-Sided Markets: Empirical Evidence from Debit Cards”,  concludes that regulation to limit that amount banks can charge for debit transactions (ie, the Durbin Amendment of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act) led to higher checking account fees  for consumers (previously subsidized) and accelerated the adoption of credit cards with higher interchange fees (cutting down on potential savings for merchants). In summar, the regulation’s stated objective of enhancing consumers’ welfare through lower retail prices was not met. Having looked at this issue across different markets and over many years, I have to say that I am not surprised and remain convinced that regulators should focus on more competion (from instant payments, for example) than trying to fix prices.

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Specifically, consumers and small businesses sent 2.9 billion transactions totalling $806bn in 2023, both up 28% year-over-year. And some 120 million consumer and small business user accounts leveraged Zelle through their financial institution in 2023. The fourth quarter of 2023 was the largest quarter to date with users transacting more than $219bn across the Zelle Network. That means an average of more than $100m was sent per hour.

From: Zelle transactions rise by 28% y-o-y to hit $806bn – GlobalData.

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the company has been loading more ATMs with $100 bills lately. The note is especially popular among ATMs in barbershops, tattoo shops, hotels and convenience stores.

From: The $100 Bill Is America’s Most Common Currency, and Its Most Annoying – WSJ.

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Tomorrow’s Transactions is turning 21!  And we’re celebrating the birthday in historic surroundings at the Tower of London. It’s always a great opportunity to look back at the lessons that have been learned across the past decades and cast an eye out to the future – where will technology and regulation, take our world of transactions?

From: .

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In the UK I bank with Monzo. With 9M customers and a valuation of £4BN, they are now the 7th largest bank in the country.

And they have zero branches, and no online web banking.

Instead, it’s an app. That’s it.

It’s fair to say they are a Digital Bank.

But last week they asked me for a manual ID check. They needed a selfie of me holding an ID document, which I had to email them. Whaaat?

From: “Ripping” IDs Should Go the Way of CDs, Klarna’s AI Assistant and the Future of Loyalty.

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David Kelts has been working on this stuff for years, and is a digital ID expert. He makes the same point about digital vs. digitized, and likens scanning ID documents to ‘ripping CDs’.

It’s an analogy that won’t make sense to anyone under 35 (you’ll need to Google it). But it’s a helpful way to think about today’s nonsense of taking selfies and photos of documents.

“Remember endless hours ripping your CD collection to digital… why are we spending endless hours scanning analog ID documents over and over again? Alternatives exist.

“”Let’s think differently about how Mobile KYC fails customers

Manually taking a quality, flat, well-lit, high-res picture of a card is hard
Taking an ICAO-quality, well-lit, machine-matchable portrait is difficult. Everybody wants to smile (or make duck lips …idk…) in a selfie
Webcams are very low resolution compared to phones and vary widely
PDF417 Barcodes from the back of DL/ID cards are easy to generate and nearly every Fake ID has the same information on the back and front
Connections to databases that would verify the authenticity and validity of a DL/ID are expensive or restricted to law enforcement (makes sense)
Most hard-to-forge security features of an ID card require multi-spectral light, are tactile, or require magnification. Phones capture visible light
Cropping the card portrait results in a small, low-res photo for machine-matching that has security lines, holograms, and indicia through it
Cropping a portrait from a poorly captured, low-res ID card will not give sufficient resolution to measure the facial features for matching
You need cloud/phone processing power to determine that a human is live and real for the probe image — called Presentation Attack Detection
I have to ID myself repeatedly with each new service that wants (notice I didn’t say “needs”) ID and each KYC system differs, creating doubt
He goes on to say it’s time to fix this mess. And that a Mobile Driver’s License (mDL) is a smart option. Not least because it’s already available for nearly 1 in 5 people in the US who carry an identity card.

From: “Ripping” IDs Should Go the Way of CDs, Klarna’s AI Assistant and the Future of Loyalty.

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