A library of snippets
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Craig Milligan, 47, of Dumfries, used several aliases – including those of two dead men – to fraudulently open accounts and obtain credit cards.
From: Man who accumulated more than £1million in identity fraud crime jailed for four years. | COPFS.
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In October, hackers stole government IDs of 70,000 Discord users from a third-party service that Discord previously trusted to verify ages in the United Kingdom and Australia.
From: Discord faces backlash over age checks after data breach exposed 70,000 IDs – Ars Technica.
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Enter x402: The Web’s Native Payment Protocol
HTTP has always had a status code for payments: 402 Payment Required. It was reserved in 1999 but never standardized. Until now.The x402 protocol finally gives meaning to that status code:
Client requests a resource
Server responds with 402 and payment requirements
Client signs a payment authorization locally
Server verifies and settles the payment
Client gets access to the resource
No redirects. No checkout flows. No human intervention. Just HTTP.Nevermined’s Programmable Extension: nvm:erc4337
Standard x402 handles simple “pay X tokens for this request” flows. But AI agents need more:Subscription models: “This agent is on our enterprise plan”
Credit systems: “Deduct 5 credits from my balance”
Usage caps: “Don’t let me spend more than $100 today”
Delegated payments: “My company’s smart account pays, not me personally”
That’s why we built the nvm:erc4337 scheme—an extension that makes x402 programmable.From: Blog Posts.
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Apple is developing an AI-powered wearable pin that could be released as early as 2027, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
The device would position Apple to compete more effectively with OpenAI, which is planning its own AI-powered devices, and Meta Platforms, which is already selling smart glasses.
Apple’s pin is a thin, flat, circular disc with an aluminum-and-glass shell and features two cameras—a standard lens and a wide-angle lens—on its front face, designed to capture photos and videos of the user’s surroundings. It includes three microphones to pick up sounds in the area surrounding the person wearing it.
It also has a speaker, a physical button along one of its edges and a magnetic inductive charging interface on its back, similar to the one used on the Apple Watch. Apple engineers are aiming to make the pin the same size as an AirTag, only slightly thicker.
From: Apple Developing AI Wearable Pin in Challenge to OpenAI, Meta — The Information.
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The PoC will demonstrate how a mobile ID wallet app can serve as a trusted digital identity channel to authenticate calling customers.
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The data reveals that Monzo made the wrong call in 34% of 3,372 cases referred to the FOS during the course of last year. NatWest ranked second, deemed to have wrongly rejected 33% of 1,972 fraud complaints, and HSBC third, with 32% of 2,535 complaints wrongly rejected.
A spokesperson for Monzo told the Guardian that some of the cases related to fraud that had happened more than two years ago.
From: Monzo tops the charts for refusing refunds to scam victims.
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Klarna has joined Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard designed to enable AI agents and commerce systems to interact across the shopping lifecycle. The announcement expands Klarna’s existing partnership with Google, which spans Google Pay, Google Store, Google Play and Google Cloud infrastructure. Klarna’s support for both the Universal Commerce Protocol and the Agent Payments Protocol reflects the company’s positioning within AI-driven commerce infrastructure development.
From: Klarna supports Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol | The Paypers.
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They said they later found that the people who had scammed them had stolen the identity of both the landlord of the property and a letting agency in order to carry out the scheme.
From: Friends left ‘in tears’ over £8k rental scam on London flat – BBC News.
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It looks like Monopoly money, but there is a twist: colourful imitation Russian banknotes are designed to help move roubles around the world in defiance of western restrictions that have severely constrained cross-border payments.
From: Inside the Russian Monopoly money network moving billions over borders.
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AI is likely to erode bank profitability as consumers start routinely using AI agents to optimize their finances (for example, automatically moving deposits into higher-yield accounts), which would reduce customer inertia and reshape industry economics. Agentic AI could disrupt deposits and credit card lending in particular by cutting through inertia. Today, $23 trillion of the global total of $70 trillion in consumer deposits sits in checking accounts with near-zero rates, while the remainder is parked in accounts that often pay relatively low savings rates, according to McKinsey Panorama data.3 If just 5 to 10 percent of checking balances migrated to top-of-market rates, an action that might be prompted by AI agents, that could reduce the banking industry’s total deposit profits by 20 percent or more.
The threat from third-party agents could be material. If banks don’t reposition their business models to adapt, over the next decade or so, bank profit pools globally could decline by $170 billion, or 9 percent.4 That’s enough to bring average returns below the cost of capital.
From: McKinsey’s Global Banking Annual Review 2025 | McKinsey.
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Snippings