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Authorities also said fake deputies would claim the Sheriff’s Office already mailed the victim a letter of documentation and that the victim did not appear for a scheduled court date.

After threatening arrest, scammers will demand amounts up to $10,500 in payment from the victims through wire or gift card, the Sheriff’s Office said. Authorities noted the scammers will often call from a spoofed caller ID reading “SAN FRANCISCO COUNTY.”

From: San Francisco Sheriff Warns Against Scammers Posing as Deputies.

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PayPal’s crypto dollars, which are managed by a third-party called Paxos, are 100% backed by the safest sorts of short-term collateral: U.S. Treasury-bills, reverse repo (backed by U.S. government securities), and commercial bank deposits. In finance lingo, these assets are known as cash and cash equivalents. A big reason for this conservative investment approach is that Paxos is subject to a set of strict investment limits as determined by its regulator, the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). You can read about the NYDFS’s stablecoin regulatory framework here.

By contrast, PayPal’s regular dollars, which are regulated piecemeal under each U.S. states’ own peculiar version of a money transmitter license, can almost always be legally backed by riskier assets. (Here is PayPal’s list of state-issued licenses.)

For instance, if you comb through the fine print at the back of PayPal’s annual report, the total amount of customer funds held in the form of regular PayPal dollars comes out to $36 billion at year-end 2022. Of this $36 billion, PayPal has invested $11 billion in “cash & cash equivalents.” Put differently, just 30% of its dollars are backed by top notch assets, far less than the 100% ratio for PayPal’s crypto dollars.

From: Moneyness: There are now two types of PayPal dollars, and one is better than the other.

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By contrast, the regulator of PayPal’s crypto-based dollars, the NYDFS, specifies that the reserves backing any crypto-based dollar “shall be held at these depository institutions and custodians for the benefit of the holders of the stablecoin, with appropriate titling of accounts.” T

This is kind of like an ELMI licence in Europe. Interestingly, this approach was tested and found safe when Wirecard went under, because Wirecard in the UK was not a bank but an electronic money instutiutiuon. As with NYDFS stipulation, all customers funds were held in a 100% reserve of commercial bank money. Wirecard shareholders and bondholders were wiped out, as they should have been in a captialisat economy, but customers were not.

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The number of UK banks investing in technologies such as VR and AR in preparation for entering the Metaverse dropped by nearly a third in the past year. More than half of UK banks were investing in these technologies 12 months ago, compared to just 38% in 2023.

Asked which emerging technologies and tools they’re engaging with as a priority, almost a quarter cite cybersecurity, with 22% pointing to cloud and 21% highlighting Open Banking APIs.

However, the research shows that UK banks are lagging behind the rest of the world on Generative AI adoption, with just 13% of them engaging with ChatGPT, compared to 19% of global banks.

From: UK banks ditch the Metaverse.

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Visa has invested in Form3 as part of a wider commercial partnership with the cloud-based account-to-account payments platform. The size of the investment was not disclosed.

Form3 will provide Visa’s clients with access to its payments platform. The partnership also aims to reduce high levels of fraud in real-time account-to-account payments, including by building on Form3’s single API connectivity.

From: Visa invests in A2A payments platform Form3.

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The iPhone 15 runs on the same A16 chip as the iPhone 14 Pro and it has a second-gen ultra wideband chip. Apple says the latter can help you find your friends’ exact location when you’re looking for them in a crowded place.

From: Everything announced at today’s Apple event: iPhone 15, USB-C, Apple Watch Series 9 and more.

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A key difference between consumer and employee identity practices is risk tolerance. The optimal tolerance for consumer fraud is non-zero, while the optimal tolerance for corporate infosec failures is zero.

From: What Consumers Can Teach Us About The Future of Employee Identity Management | by Jelena Hoffart | 9Yards Capital | Sep, 2023 | Medium.

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In the Philippines, the NBI ran an “experiment” and found that SIM cards can be registered even with the photo of an animal, calling into question the security of the new digital ID system, says Philstar.
According to Jeremy Lotoc, NBI Cybercrime Division Chief, the division successfully registered a newly bought SIM card into the system using a fake ID bearing the face of a monkey smiling, according to a senate hearing on September 5th.

From: SIM registration system in Philippines accepts digital IDs with animal faces | Biometric Update.

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company’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, said he would love to equip them with facial recognition capabilities.

In a recording of the internal meeting, Mr. Bosworth said that leaving facial recognition out of augmented reality glasses was a lost opportunity for enhancing human memory.

From The Technology Facebook and Google Didn’t Dare Release – The New York Times.

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The $999 pair of augmented reality glasses, made by a company called Vuzix, connects the wearer to Clearview’s database of 30 billion faces. Clearview’s A.R. app, which can identity someone up to 10 feet away, is not yet publicly available, but the Air Force has provided funding for its possible use at military bases.

From The Technology Facebook and Google Didn’t Dare Release – The New York Times.

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the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) have published their report into “tap to pay”, which finds that financial services providers can offer applications to facilitate POS payments but “cannot rely on NFC technology on mobile devices using Apple’s iOS operating system”. This means that competition is limited and that widely used payment apps such as PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App are not available via convenient contactless connectivity and that consumers must use Apple’s proprietary payment service, Apple Pay.

Tap-to-pay is here to stay.

Overall, roughly three in four of 130 million iPhone users have activated Apple Pay, with nearly 56 million U.S. consumers making an in-store payment using Apple Pay in April 2023, accounting for nearly half of iOS users. And in 2021, there were an estimated 25 million Google Pay users, which is forecast to grow by another 10 million users by 2025. Visa recently reported that 1 in 3 Americans use tap-to-pay for purchases, seven times the use from just three years ago. Mastercard reported that contactless payments globally account for over 60 percent of in-person transactions.

 

Anil John, Technical Director of Silicon Valley Innovation Program at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, commented on the report calling it “recommended reading” and saying that if you substitute “payments” with “identity” in much of the report, “it gives you a preview and the playbook” that is, and will be, used by the Techfins to make themselves gatekeepers when it comes to identity related transactions that take place on mobile devices (ie, pretty much all identity-rlated transactions). He is of course correct and , as has been obvious for years, when tap-to-pay becomes a subset of a more generalised tap-to-prove infrastructure, those gatekeepers will have significant power. Back in 2014, in my tongue-in-cheek reminiscences of Money20/20 in Las Vegas that year, I made the same point about Apple, saying through the voice of an alter ego “I don’t fall for your ‘easy payment’ waffle. I know it’s just a trojan horse for your wallet play: loyalty, coupons and — if you have your dastardly way — identity.”