Snippings

xxx

Americans under 30 get much of their news on TikTok. They hear about money there, too, and that’s shaping the way they save, spend and view their financial prospects, young adults and economists say.

From: How TikTok Is Wiring Gen Z’s Money Brain – WSJ.

xxx

xxx

What I absolutely don’t understand, is the request is to provide our bank details again separately on headed paper. The first time I was asked to do this I didn’t have anything ready to send so how did I produce headed paper? Well, it wasn’t too hard. I typed our bank details into a word document, added a clever little watermark, put our logo at the top, added our company info and saved as a PDF. Hey presto, undeniable proof of our details. I am sure that nobody that makes a living out of committing fraud would ever have such ingenuity.

From: (1) Time to Rethink Collecting Bank Details: Let’s make Gavin happy.

xxx

xxx

Now, for the 1st time ever, you can buy a real-world item on Roblox!

Visit our 🛍️ IRL commerce shop 🛍️ in this experience to check out the real-world items chosen by our partner UGC creators— MD17_RBLX, Junozy, & Sarabxlla.

Each purchase comes with a 🎊FREE VIRTUAL TWIN 🎊 created by our partner UGC creators.

From: Walmart Discovered – Roblox.

xxx

xxx

Discrepancy between total transfer volume vs. bot-adjusted transfer volume. When we apply a simple heuristic that removes inorganic data, we see that transfer volume for the last 30 days can be adjusted from $2.65T to $265B2

From: Making sense of stablecoins | Visa.

xxx

xxx

In a Delhi High Court proceeding last Thursday, WhatsApp said it would be forced to leave the country if the court required traceability, as doing so would mean breaking end-to-end encryption.

From: WhatsApp could leave India over encryption battle – Rest of World.

xxx

xxx

Indonesia’s Bukalapak, an e-commerce platform with more than 150 million users and 20 million business owners, partnered with Standard Chartered nexus to launch its own digital banking service, powered by audax. They have launched BukaTabungan which provides a paperless, digital banking access, serving Bukalapak’s more than 150 million users and 20 million business owners. By August 2023, the latest reported data available, it had 230,000 active users, and 98% of them were new to the bank.

Through audax’s tech solution, Bukalapak is offering current account and savings account services, debit cards and, to its whitelisted users, lending.

From: Standard Chartered Offers Banking As A Service (BaaS) Through audax.

xxx

xxx

Mr Khan calls the accounts and sites that plant the story “seeders”. Rather than using hundreds of fake accounts to promote these sites’ material, distribution instead relies on a few so-called “spreaders”—social-media accounts with large numbers of followers. Spreader accounts typically build a following by posting about football, or featuring scantily clad women. “And then they’ll flip,” says Mr Khan: they start mixing in disinformation from seeders, by linking to or reposting their content.

From: Disinformation is on the rise. How does it work?.

xxx

xxx

Both the video clips and audio were probably created using artificial intelligence (ai) and posted by a Chinese state-backed propaganda group known variously as Spamouflage, Dragonbridge and Storm-1376. In a report released on April 5th, the Threat Intelligence team at Microsoft, a tech firm, said this was the first time it had seen a nation-state use ai-generated material to sway a foreign election.

From: Disinformation is on the rise. How does it work?.

xxx

xxx

The investigation was launched after agents uncovered an operation in New York and New Jersey that laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in proceeds from illicit narcotics through TD and other banks, according to court documents and people familiar with the matter. In that case and at least one other, prosecutors also allege the criminals bribed TD employees.

From: TD Bank Probe Tied to Laundering of Illicit Fentanyl Profits – WSJ.

xxx

In 2004, the former Prime Minister of our United Kingdom, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel  Johnson wrote in a newspaper here if he were ever asked to produce an ID card as evidence that “I am who I say I am” in “any other venue, public or private” then he would “take that card out of my wallet and physically eat it in the presence of whatever emanation of the state has demanded I produce it”. This was before his government introduced (pointless and expensive) mandatory voter ID requriements at polling stations. Which is why I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when he was turned away from his local polling station after forgetting to bring acceptable photo ID.