Snippings

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Members of TSB’s fraud team sampled 100 Facebook Marketplace posts on their feed – including cars, watches, games consoles, air fryers and handbags – and engaged with the seller to determine whether the items were genuinely for sale, or scams.

The study concluded that 34 percent of the listings were fraudulent once the seller used tactics known to be commonly used by purchase fraud criminals. For instance, sellers deemed to be scammers directed TSB fraud experts to fake websites; refused to allow viewing of an item in person and demanded advanced fees. TSB also discovered items advertised as ‘brand new’, for hundreds of pounds less than their real retail price.

The findings chime with the excessive fraud rate from Facebook Marketplace, which currently accounts for 73 percent of all purchase fraud cases at TSB – and remains the biggest driver of fraud by volume.

From: TSB finds over a third of adverts on Facebook Marketplace could be scams.

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Banks’ share of total financial assets in almost all economies has been steadily declining. The trend is accentuated in markets where many banks have unsustainable financial returns—bank valuations remaining below book value for sustained periods—and in high-growth economies where demand for production credit is rising at a rapid pace. A cross-market review of banks suggests that those with business models anchored in primary customer relationships have high valuations.

From: To Seize a $7 Trillion Opportunity, Banks Need Bolder Strategies for Serving Customers and Society | BCG.

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Why biometrics and wearables are future POS winners

From: Why biometric and wearables are future POS winners.

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OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance (OpenID4VCI, which is barely shorter than the name of the specification), is an issuance protocol. This issuance format can be used with just about any issuance format. ISO’s mdoc, W3C’s Verifiable Credentials, it’s open to most everything. The purpose of the protocol is to make sure that the credentials are transported in a standardized way. OpenID4VCI is still in draft, so it is something of a moving target for anyone not deeply embedded in the space already.

But OpenID4VCI isn’t the only issuance protocol under development. The  ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 17 committee is working on 23220-3 – Cards and security devices for personal identification – Building blocks for identity management via mobile devices – Part 3: Protocols and services for issuing phase. My expectation is that this work will align more closely with the mdoc/mDL work and its more restricted underlying assumptions, but I am not closely tied to the ISO efforts.

From: More on the Options and Diversity of Verifiable Credentials – Spherical Cow Consulting.

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Newly launched bitcoin exchange-traded funds enable the cryptocurrency to be bought as easily as stocks, but a top Goldman Sachs executive said digital currencies are still more like roulette than anything that should be in your retirement account.
“If you want to go to Las Vegas, great,” said Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani, who leads the investment strategy group at Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management.
“People can use it if they want for total speculation, but it is not an investment and people should not be investing in cryptocurrencies, in bitcoin, in the ETF, as part of an investment portfolio.”
Mossavar-Rahmani, who helps advise the firm’s wealthy clients, said the problem with cryptocurrency is that there’s no real value to it—except for criminals. She compared crypto unfavorably to artificial intelligence, source of a separate speculative frenzy.

From: Goldman Investing Chief: ETFs Don’t Make Bitcoin an Investment.

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(Business Insider verified earnings by reviewing Venmo, Zelle, PayPal, and mobile deposits that were made to Lee’s bank account in early December.)

From: Ex-Wall Street Accountant Now Stripper: How She Makes Holiday Fortune.

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Early last year, Jimmy Su, the chief security officer for cryptocurrency exchange Binance, told Cointelegraph that deepfake tools today are sufficient to pass liveness checks, even those that require users to perform actions like head turns in real time.

The takeaway is that KYC, which was already hit or miss, could soon become effectively useless as a security measure. Su, for one, doesn’t believe deepfaked images and video have reached the point where they can fool human reviewers. But it might only be a matter of time before that changes.

From: GenAI could make KYC effectively useless | TechCrunch.

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Ravelin

Based on a survey of 6,000 adults across the UK, France, and Germany, this new research sheds new light on the soaring phenomenon of friendly and first-party fraud and policy abuse by consumers.

Download The dark side of online shopping – the rise of friendly fraud to find out who is committing fraud, why and how: 
Why 40% of online shoppers committed fraud in the past year

From: Ravelin’s consumer & friendly fraud survey 2023.

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When we asked Cassie to give up contactless she saved £15 on her weekly supermarket shop by swerving her usual sweet treat and a bottle of wine.

From: Two mums save £166 a week switching from contactless to cash as experts say using coins and pennies helps to budget | The Sun.

What this has to do with contactless I’m not sure.

If you read any business or finance news this week, it is impossible not to notice that it is Davos time again. Davos, which is the World Economic Forum’s annual event at which the global elite flying in by private plane and helicopter to discuss global warming and so on, never seemed particularly interesting to me. I rather agree with Andrew Curry, who says that the worst thing about the event is the temptation to take it seriously. Nevertheless, finance leaders do turn up and make speeches and in recent years these have naturally covered the evolution of fintechs and techfins, so I have from time to time found some interesting comments to reflect on.