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Earlier this year, prosecutors in China accused two people of stealing more than $77 million by setting up a fake shell company purporting to sell leather bags and sending fraudulent tax invoices to their supposed clients. The pair was able to send out official-looking invoices by fooling the local government tax office’s facial-recognition system, which was set up to track payments and crack down on tax evasion, according to prosecutors cited in a March report in the Xinhua Daily Telegraph. Prosecutors said in a posting on the Chinese chat service WeChat that the attackers had hacked the local government’s facial-recognition service with videos they had produced. The Shanghai prosecutors couldn’t be reached for comment.

The pair bought high-definition photographs of faces from an online black market, then used an app to create videos from the photos to make it look like the faces were nodding, blinking and opening their mouths, the report says.

From Faces Are the Next Target for Fraudsters – WSJ:

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Analysts at credit-scoring company Experian PLC said in a March security report that they expect to see fraudsters increasingly create “Frankenstein faces,” using AI to combine facial characteristics from different people to form a new identity to fool facial ID systems.

From Faces Are the Next Target for Fraudsters – WSJ:

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Second, encryption is reversible, which makes it more appealing for the victim to concede. As with kidnapping, it is the prospect of getting the hostage back — in this case, the recovery of data and systems — that makes concessions attractive.

From Opinion | Could Ransomware Become a Geopolitical Weapon? Game Theory Says Yes. – POLITICO:

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Thank goodness all these attackers want is Bitcoin. Jenny Jun of the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative (and co-author of North Korea’s Cyber Operations: Strategy and Responses) asks a frightening question: given that ransomware operators can mount these attacks so frequently and extort large sums of money from victims, encryption is a demonstrably successful weapon. What if a hostile state or a terrorist group starts using the same tool to demand something more than money?

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The House of Representative’s Improving Digital Identity Act does not seem to offer much in the way of concrete regulations, but does include a series of initiatives that would update and enhance the government’s outdated identity framework.

Should the Act get passed, the President would need to create a new Improving Digital Identity Task Force with representatives from a number of key agencies, including the Departments of Treasury, State, and Education. It would also include additional members from the local and state government levels.

From US Lawmakers Ask Government to Deliver Better Digital Identity Framework.

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LONDON, July 08, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Today, the biggest report into the growth of mobile wallets ever published, projects that one in two people will use a mobile wallet by 2025. At the end of 2020, there were over 2.8 billion mobile wallets in use. That number is projected to increase by nearly 74% to reach 4.8 billion mobile wallets in use by the end of 2025 – nearly 60% of the world’s population. The fastest growing markets are Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa & Middle East where mobile wallets are displacing cash and cards for more convenient digital payments.

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Late-night gaming sessions for Chinese children are going to be much harder now that Tencent, China’s largest tech company, is using facial recognition to stop kids from gaming after bedtime. Announced in a press release yesterday, Tencent said its new technology would require players to confirm their identity via facial recognition algorithm in order to keep playing mobile games past 10 pm.

From Tencent is now using facial recognition to stop children in China from gaming all night | PC Gamer.

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MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency business with close ties to Signal and its founder, Moxie Marlinspike, has raised more than $75 million in venture capital funding at a $1 billion valuation, more than 10 times higher than at its last financing in March, according to two people familiar with the matter.

From MobileCoin, Which Powers Crypto Payments on Signal, Valued at $1 Billion — The Information.

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If you have a MobileCoin wallet, you can link it to your Signal account to send coins to contacts for a vanishingly small fee. I This is the sort of thing that I had expected from Facebook by now (link your Novi wallet to your WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook apps) but so far they seem a little behind on the obvious and inevitable collision between messaging and money.

Wise moved £54 billion across borders last year.

Wise, formerly Transferwise, is a low-fee processor of cross-border payments and very successful – pre-tax profit doubled last year to £41m and the business is still grabbing share from sleepy banks. The reason for the relative lack of fanfare was Wise’s novel approach to joining the stock market: a direct listing in which the shares simply start trading after a three-hour auction to get the show rolling.

Wise wasn’t raising money, thus there was no need for new equity to be priced beforehand and no sure guide to what the company would be worth. It finished its first day in public form at £8.75bn, more than twice its valuation in its last private funding round last year.

From Payments firm Wise’s successful float is a relief after Deliveroo flop | Nils Pratley | The Guardian.

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Mercator has studied the gap that exists between the open banking vision of PSD2 and the on-the-ground reality. This knowledge of API limitations can be used to inform any business leader contemplating a similar form of API platform. Mercator Advisory Group’s latest research report, A Lesson for the U.S: How EU Open Banking APIs Have Stabilized to Support Alternative Networks evaluates the issues that have plagued the delivery of Open Banking within the European Union, identifies how fintechs have filled the gap by implementing API middleware, and provides a synopsis of six alternative network solutions that have evolved to leverage the Open Banking APIs.

“It has taken much longer than expected to establish the Open Banking API infrastructure, but the EU is closer than ever to having the concept fully operational. A patchwork of banks are now operational, although many have limited reliability. This points to the cost associated with managing a reliable production-ready API platform. But despite the limitations, several alternative networks have been announced, mostly limited to the UK, which has the most advanced Open Banking infrastructure,” comments Tim Sloane, VP of Payments Innovation and Director of the Emerging Technologies Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group and the author of the report. “There are many lessons to be learned out of the hard work that has gone into building the EU Open Banking infrastructure as it exists today, and it would be a terrible mistake to ignore those lessons when building your own API platforms.”

From Emerging Technologies Research Document – A Lesson for the U.S: How EU Open Banking APIs Have Stabilized to Support Alternative Networks – Mercator Advisory Group:

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