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That one company could become the global infrastructure for the digital identity for everyone on the planet, or for many billions of them at least, is a cause for concern amongst many.

From Worldcoin Wants To Be The World’s Digital Identity System.

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Following the footsteps of WormGPT, threat actors are advertising yet another cybercrime generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool dubbed FraudGPT on various dark web marketplaces and Telegram channels.

“This is an AI bot, exclusively targeted for offensive purposes, such as crafting spear phishing emails, creating cracking tools, carding, etc.,” Netenrich security researcher Rakesh Krishnan said in a report published Tuesday.

The cybersecurity firm said the offering has been circulating since at least July 22, 2023, for a subscription cost of $200 a month (or $1,000 for six months and $1,700 for a year).

From New AI Tool ‘FraudGPT’ Emerges, Tailored for Sophisticated Attacks.

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And a final side point: aside from Vitalik’s nonsense around ‘Soul-Based Tokens’, he’s getting dangerously close to actually understanding how digital ID could work using a digital wallet and ‘zero knowledge proofs’.

From AI is clumsy, disrespectful and biased (again), Vitalik Buterin on biometric proof of personhood, and giving products a digital passport | LinkedIn.

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Well, I disagree slightly. Soul-bound tokens aren’t nonsense, they are a very specific solution to a very specific problem, which is not the problem that most of us a trying to solve in the round. 

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But there’s a new one worth watching. Headphones that can measure biometric signals and brainwaves.

While Elon Musk is busy embedding wet chips into your brain, Tim Cook is going ‘over the top’, adding sensors (and of course AI) into the devices we already wear. First watches, now smart in-ear headphones.

From AI is clumsy, disrespectful and biased (again), Vitalik Buterin on biometric proof of personhood, and giving products a digital passport | LinkedIn.

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If nothing else, these responses make clear that cash is much more than a payments technology. It is one of the purest and oldest forms of public good, a symbol of identity and sovereignty. Choices about this public good are, ultimately and rightly, ones for citizens rather than central bankers or cryptographers. They are social, not technological, choices — and sometimes emotional ones.

From: The real scandal of central bank digital currency | Financial Times.

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Now Plaid, which has around 1,000 employees, is leaning more heavily on selling identity verification tools and services related to loan applications and payments, competing with firms such as Socure, Stripe and Finicity.

Some of Plaid’s diversification has come by way of its acquisition of identity verification startup Cognito for a reported $250 million in 2022. Plaid has been able to cross-sell that service, which allows businesses to screen new users for fraud risk, to nearly half of its new customers, Eric Sager, Plaid’s chief operating officer, told The Information.

From Plaid’s Leadership Evolves to Prove It’s Not a One-Hit Wonder — The Information:

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AI is being considered for fraud protection efforts in different ways by these organizations. Schmiedl said JPMorgan Chase has evolved from algorithms to machine learning and neural nets to look at fraudulent card activity, examining unstructured data, and entity extraction. “There’s an inherent signal in every email,” he said. “Actors that are trying to create fraudulent emails tend to basically use different patterns and you can learn those patterns through AI/ML.”

JPMorgan Chase is assessing the use of large language models, Schmiedl said, for fraud, risk, and other possible areas. Such efforts have focused on in-house data and resources, he said, focusing on the firm’s own ecosystem rather than looking externally. “If you start using these models and outside data, you start to see things that are presented like facts that aren’t facts,” Schmiedl said.

From Confronting Financial Fraud in Payments with the Help of AI:

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We observe that no archetype achieves online and cash-like offline payments use cases. Other trade-offs can be discerned, e.g., cash-like offline versus compliance, and extensibility versus offline. These suggest that a system based on a single archetype will not likely satisfy all policy goals of a retail CBDC system. It is more likely that a hybrid system combining aspects of more than one archetype would be needed to meet the central bank’s goals.

From Archetypes for a retail CBDC – Bank of Canada.

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In December, ABC Investigations revealed how criminals were gaining unauthorised entry to the ATO’s data by creating false myGov accounts and linking them to the tax files of genuine taxpayers.

myGov is the central hub used to access an array of Commonwealth services including the ATO, Medicare, and Services Australia.

The report exposed how credentials stolen from high-profile hacks like Medibank and Optus have been used by criminals to circumvent security checkpoints used by the ATO, and how the agency was failing to identify some fraudulent activity on accounts it managed.

The tax office has now revealed through a Freedom of Information request that more than $557 million was fraudulently claimed in less than two years by fraudsters cheating the identity checks set by the tax office, and hacking into genuine taxpayers’ ATO accounts.

From ATO reveals more than $557 million claimed by fraudsters exploiting security loophole – ABC News.

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In the future, open banking-style data sharing by investors could spark innovation in new fintech services for retail investors. A form of digital ID has helped market reform in the likes of Singapore and Sweden, where 22 per cent of households own stocks and shares compared with 11 per cent in the UK according to think-tank New Financial.

From Let’s kill off the City’s old-fashioned paper fetish once and for all | Financial Times.

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