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In another suit filed against Bank of America in May, plaintiff Mohammad Al-Ramahi alleges he was tricked into sending $4,950 through the platform as part of a scam in which he thought he was sending the money in his role at a new job.

From Banks aren’t doing enough to address Zelle fraud, senators say | Banking Dive.

I feel very sorry for Mr. Al-Ramahi and I don’t doubt that he was indeed the victim merciless scammers. But why is it his bank’s fault? The money could only have been sent to another bank, and US banks have famously extensive (and expensive) KYC procedures, so it should be fairly easy to obtain justice. If the destination bank knows who the scammer is, the police can arrest the scammer. If the destination bank does not know who the scammer is, the police can arrest the compliance officer.

I’ve been a fan of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game (universally known as D&D) for more than 40 years now. I was hooked on it from the first time I played it. When it was first published in 1974, it was a revolution in game playing, creating this idea of a Dungeon Master (DM) who serves as referee and organiser, maintaining the setting in which adventures occur, while the players take the part of characters interacting in that setting.

In 1977, the game was split into two branches: the relatively rules-light game system of basic Dungeons & Dragons, and the more structured, rules-heavy game system of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D), which is where I started my journey, moving on to the AD&D 2nd Edition in 1989.I didn’t play it she much then, what with work and starting a family, but in 2000 it moved on to the D&D 3rd edition and then on to a revised version 3.5 in June 2003. I started my kids and their friends on the “gateway drug” of Heroquest (one of my all-time favourite tabletop games, which has just been reissued to a new generation) and then when they were around 8 or 9 moved them on to D&D 3.5, ,which they continued to play through high school, university and into their working lives in a campaign that finally came to an end earlier this year when the band of heroes defeated the tarrasque and saved the world.

There was a not very good 4th edition that was released and generally ignored in June 2008 and then in 2014 came the wildly successful fifth edition. D&D 5e, which is what I have played since it was first released is a marvel and D&D is now a huge business, mainstream entertainment and no longer the hidden passion of nerds. 

Louis Rosenberg, is CEO of Unanimous AI. His doctoral work at Stanford University resulted in the virtual fixtures system for the U.S. Air Force – an immersive augmented-reality system built in 1992. He predicted: “By 2035 people will laugh at images of the 2020s that show people walking down the street staring down at a phone, necks bent, thinking it looks awkward and primitive. The metaverse will evolve in two directions at once – the virtual metaverse (fully simulated worlds) and the augmented metaverse (layers of rich virtual content overlaid upon the real world with precise spatial registration).

The augmented metaverse, on the other hand, will replace mobile phones as our primary gateway to digital content. The transition from mobile phones to AR hardware will begin the middle of the 2020s and will be complete by 2035, possibly sooner.

From The Metaverse in 2040 | Pew Research Center.

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One can trace the origin of the metaverse back to Dungeons & Dragons before it was digitized and look at it as an imaginary, creative space of social interaction and storytelling.

From The Metaverse in 2040 | Pew Research Center.

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Interac, a Canadian e-transfer service, is currently down due to issues with the Rogers network provider.

From Rogers outage shuts down Canadian banks’ ATMs, POS and internet banking.

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Canadian debit network Interac is adding a backup network provider in the wake of last week’s massive outage at Rogers, which left millions of customers unable to make payments.

In a statement to Reuters, the firm says: “We are adding a supplier (besides Rogers) to strengthen our existing network redundancy so Canadians can continue to rely on Interac daily.”

The Rogers outage, which lasted throughout Friday, left Canadians unable to make debit payments online and in-store.

It also knocked out the hugely popular e-transfer service, which lets the customers of 13 Canadian financial institutions send money directly from their bank accounts to the accounts of other consumers and businesses, using their email address or mobile number.

From Interac adds backup supplier following Rogers outage.

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DeFi can’t succeed if it’s circular, feeding speculative games based on a speculative bubble.

From 🧠🍝 – 3rd July 2022 – The bull case for DeFi, FTX does all the things, and the Robinhood memestock reckoning begins:

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First among the FATF’s concerns is that most DeFi protocols and applications are operating outside the regulatory perimeter – despite its call for countries to regulate DeFi. While some regulators have begun pursuing enforcement actions against non-compliant DeFi platforms, most have yet to regulate the space. This presents a vulnerability in the FATF’s view, as it allows criminals free reign to exploit DeFi services.

Second among the FATF’s DeFi worries is the growing use of mixing services in the DeFi space that enable money laundering. As Elliptic has noted separately, cybercriminals, including North Korean hackers, are increasingly using DeFi mixing services – such as the popular Tornado Cash mixer – in an attempt to obscure their illicit activity.

Third, the FATF highlights the increasing risks associated with cross-chain activity in the DeFi space. According to the FATF: “DeFi protocols can be used to perform ‘chain-hopping’ which can make the transactions more difficult to trace.” Chain-hopping refers to the practice of criminals swapping funds across different cryptoassets to obfuscate their funds trail. In the DeFi ecosystem, this is achieved using cross-chain bridges, an innovation that enables users to move funds seamlessly across cryptoasset blockchains.

As Elliptic’s research has highlighted, cross-chain bridges are becoming an increasingly important part of the criminal ecosystem.

From The FATF’s Virtual Asset Report: Calling Out Cross-chain DeFi Risks and Unhosted Wallets | Elliptic | Elliptic Connect:

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I’m tantalized by the idea that FTX could tokenize stocks. With Embed, could FTX potentially “park” a real stock and have it move as a token inside the web3 ecosystem? FTX would be the broker, custodian, and clearing house for the Metaverse.

From 🧠🍝 – 3rd July 2022 – The bull case for DeFi, FTX does all the things, and the Robinhood memestock reckoning begins:

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Criminals laundered $8.6bn (£6.4bn) of cryptocurrency in 2021, up by 30% from the previous year, a report by blockchain data company Chainalysis says.
It says police could strike a “huge blow” by targeting key services used to launder cryptocurrency by criminals.
The company previously estimated criminals received a record $14bn in cryptocurrencies in 2021 [and] notes that “while billions of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency moves from illicit addresses every year, most of it ends up at a surprisingly small group of services, many of which appear purpose-built for money laundering”.

From Crypto money laundering rises 30%, report finds – BBC News.

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These protocols control loan books in the billions of dollars. Their lending standards, their borrowers / lenders’ addresses, and their liquidation levels are completely transparent as it is all published publicly to the blockchain. We can evaluate the health of their loan books in real-time. Depositors in these protocols can process all the relevant information about the health of these protocols before they deposit their funds. Contrast that with the opaque nature of centralised lenders, where the depositors only have slick marketing campaigns to consider.

From Number Three. (Any views expressed in the below are… | by Arthur Hayes | Jul, 2022 | Entrepreneur’s Handbook.

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