A library of snippets
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Amit Kumar, Chief Technology Officer, Easebuzz says, “UPI QR code scams represent a common method employed by fraudsters to exploit individuals online. These scammers use enticing messages coupled with QR codes, tempting recipients with promises of rewards or cash. During online transactions, it’s essential to meticulously review deducted amounts for confirmation.”
From Rising UPI scam trend: Follow these tips to keep yourself safe from scammers | Mint.
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While I have no real insights into Binance and their operations, I do read the news about them. This is why I saw Columbia Business School professor Omid Malekan’s comments that Binance “did a reasonably decent job of onboarding tens of millions of poor, brown, and otherwise underprivileged people into the financial system”. I
Promoters plugged crypto as the key to accelerating Black America’s path to prosperity. It was going to level the playing field once and for all. The world of cryptocurrency was painted as a welcoming place for Black investors leery of traditional finance, a golden opportunity to build wealth and achieve financial empowerment. There was lots of talk of big returns, and few warnings of risks. Exuberance took hold.
But when markets began to crumble, Black people were left holding the bag.
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Promoters plugged crypto as the key to accelerating Black America’s path to prosperity. It was going to level the playing field once and for all. The world of cryptocurrency was painted as a welcoming place for Black investors leery of traditional finance, a golden opportunity to build wealth and achieve financial empowerment. There was lots of talk of big returns, and few warnings of risks. Exuberance took hold.
But when markets began to crumble, Black people were left holding the bag.
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“Using bitcoin prices around the time of transfers to crypto accounts as a proxy for investment price, we find that lower-income households bought crypto at substantially higher prices,” the report said.
From No, crypto isn’t the secret to building Black wealth. Here’s why. – The Washington Post.
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Tonantzin Carmona, a Brookings Institute fellow who researches crypto’s impact on minority communities, said that for inexperienced investors, this sort of high-profile hype easily obscures crypto’s drawbacks.
Carmona considers crypto’s marketing to racial minorities part of a legacy of “predatory inclusion” in the tradition of payday loans and subprime mortgages — risky services that promise access to financing that would otherwise be out of reach.
From Black, Hispanic investors struggle with faith in crypto | AP News.
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Or — an even wilder possibility! — Meta could roll out strong age verification across all its services, forcing users to confirm they are old enough to have to pay to protect their privacy. Albeit enforced age verification might be too controversial a step even for Meta (it has previously written about the complexity of understanding people’s age online at length, but in the context of trying to stop underage users from signing up for its services; so it would be ironic indeed if it ends up having to reverse its applications of age assurance tech to try to spot privacy-loving adults from masquerading as freeloading ad-free teens).
From Meta’s latest privacy rip-off will test the EU’s mettle for reining in Big Tech | TechCrunch.
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Doing a ‘back of an envelope’ pass on these figures: If we take Meta’s total monthly active users (3.74 billion, as of December 31, 2022), and assume every user is worth €120 a year in targeted ads to Meta (aka the annual cost of the ad-free subscription on web), then the company should be raking in around €448 billion annually. In fact Meta’s full year revenue for 2022 was the far lower figure of $116.61 billion (~€110 billion). Which implies its subscription offer overcharges individuals for protecting their privacy compared to the revenue Meta generates from continued access to their data. (Or, put another way, it’s a privacy rip off.)
From Meta’s latest privacy rip-off will test the EU’s mettle for reining in Big Tech | TechCrunch.
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Forced to use real names on platforms like Weibo, Chinese influencers quit social media instead.
From: Weibo is losing influencers over legal display name rule – Rest of World.
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I saw in several place that Bitcoin number go up on the back of the appointment of Javier Milei, a pro-bitcoin candidate, as the President of Argentina. He is not only in favour of Bitcoin, he is also in favour of allowing the poor to sell their organs, asking his dead dog for advice via a medium and the dollarisation of the economy. That last point caught my attention and made me wonder why Bitcoin went up when his plan is not to use Bitcoin, but greenbacks.
Earlier this year I saw a tweet from someone had just sent money to friend in Argentina using a stablecoin, USDT (Tether). It was the recipient’s preferred method of payment. The tweeter pointed out that the recipient had access to Bitcoin, but did not want it. What this confirmed to me was that in many places, people want cryptocurrency only as a second-best way of getting fiat currency. They don’t want Dogecoin, they want Dollars.
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Argentina’s central bank might lack dollars, but Argentine citizens and companies do not. Private sector actors do try to shield themselves from the country’s frequent bank runs by holding dollars in other jurisdictions or under their mattresses. At the end of 2022, Argentines held over $246 billion in foreign bank accounts, safe deposit boxes, and mostly undeclared cash, according to Argentina’s National Institute of Statistics and Census. This amounts to over 50 percent of Argentina’s GDP in current dollars for 2021 ($487 billion). Hence, the dollar scarcity pertains only to the Argentine state.
From: The Economist Gets It Wrong on Dollarization in Argentina | Cato at Liberty Blog.
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Binance was required to report suspicious transactions to FinCEN through suspicious activity reports (SARs). But they never did. Binance’s former Chief Compliance Officer told personnel that the CEO’s policy was to not report such activity, and Binance never filed a single SAR with FinCEN.
From Greedy Criminals- Binance Never Filed A Single SAR Ever – Frank on Fraud.
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He’s got a brand new car
Looks like a jaguar
It’s got leather seats
It’s got a CD player
But I don’t wanna talk about it anymore
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In March, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—the powerful federal banking regulator—tapped Prashant Kumar Bhardwaj as the first person to lead its mission to police fintech firms and the banks that power them.
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On his resume, Bhardwaj claimed he was the chief information officer at Ohio-based Fifth Third Bank between 2006 and 2010, a role that reported to the chief financial officer and oversaw a $330 million budget. The bank—one of the largest consumer banks in the midwest—never employed Bhardwaj, a spokesperson said.
Bhardwaj’s resume also said he was a director of information technology at Citi, based in New York, between 1994 and 2000. The bank has no record of his employment, according to a spokesperson.
He also claimed to have held the role of Chief Information Officer & Digital Transformation Officer at Ohio-based Huntington Bank from 2010 to 2015, reporting to the CEO and the board and managing a $250 million budget while overseeing a team of more than 500 employees. However, the position of Chief Information Officer was held by other people during that time period. One of the men who held the role said he had never heard of Bhardwaj. Huntington declined to comment.
Along with purportedly attaining top roles at large banks, Bhardwaj also claimed to have held several high-ranking positions at consulting firms. This included a job as a managing director for banking, insurance and financial services technology at Accenture, which Bhardwaj claimed to have held from 2018 to late 2022, at which point he applied for the job at the OCC. Bhardwaj claimed he was in charge of managing 14 directors and 22,000 global team members, and worked on projects such as leading an IT audit of JPMorgan Chase.
But Accenture only has a record of employing someone named Prashant Bhardwaj in a senior manager role, a rank significantly lower than the purported managing director position. His tenure at Accenture lasted less than one year, ending in June 2019, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Bhardwaj’s resume also outlines a role at an obscure Ohio-based consultancy called Das Gemacht, where he was senior vice president. He claimed the role involved managing a team of five senior directors and 3,000 global team members, and that he grew the practice to generate $386 million in revenue while working with large clients such as PNC Bank, US Bank and KeyBank on technology initiatives.
A LinkedIn profile for Das Gemacht, which claims to operate across 44 locations serving 137 Fortune 500 clients, lists only seven employees—none of whom responded to requests for comment. A 2013 lawsuit filed by Das Gemacht in the District Court for Southern District of Ohio–against a small consulting client that allegedly refused to pay a $117,000 bill–noted that Das Gemacht’s principal place of business was a small residential house in Dublin, Ohio. (Das Gemacht later dropped the case).
When it hired Bhardwaj, the OCC touted his supposedly vast experience. In an internal note to staff sent in March, which The Information obtained, OCC senior deputy comptroller Grovetta Gardineer cited Bhardwaj’s roles at Accenture, Fifth Third, Huntington and Citi as evidence of “his considerable expertise on matters involving digital assets, fintech partnerships, advanced data analytics, cloud adoption and other changing technologies and business models that affect OCC-supervised banks.” Gardineer didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Heavily redacted correspondence between the OCC and Bhardwaj obtained by The Information shows that the agency asked Bhardwaj for recent pay stubs and to flag any potential conflicts of interests in a financial disclosure prior to confirming his appointment.
The OCC also asked Bhardwaj to confirm the dates he was conferred his two Master’s degrees, which he claimed to have received from the University of Cincinnati and the International Management Institute Universiade de Brussels–the latter of which does not exist, as previously reported by Fintech Business Weekly, which first noted Bhardwawj’s disappearance from the agency.
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The research anticipates that widespread adoption of digital verification within banking, particularly mobile banking, will continue to drive digital onboarding revenue growth.
Despite the aforementioned increase in efficiency reducing the cost of each individual digital identity verification check, the growing volume of checks, particularly in developing regions, will offset this. As such, Juniper Research forecasts that total spend for banks will increase from $7.4 billion in 2023, to $9.9 billion in 2028; representing a 34% increase.
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