Snippings

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1. Fake buyer scams

Scammers pose as genuine buyers to steal the personal details of the property owner.

Scammers can convincingly pretend to be buyers by forging and sending fake documents and proof of deposit. They will appear like good buyers, often offering the asking price or higher, to secure the property. Once they have gained enough details about the property and its owner, they’ll end all contact.

2. Bogus conveyancing firms

Fraudsters will impersonate genuine solicitors or conveyancing firms in order to steal money or personal information during the house buying process.

Sometimes, the fraudster will hack into a solicitor’s or buyer’s email account, impersonate the solicitor and then provide alternative bank details for deposits to be paid to. Other times, the fraudster will call the buyer, impersonating an employee at the solicitor’s office and provide bank details this way.

Fraudsters also create fake websites impersonating legitimate solicitors or firms.

Read more: ‘A scammer impersonated my conveyancing solicitor’
3. Under-valuation scams by ‘cash buyers’

This is when dodgy cash buying companies make an unrealistically high offer on your property pending an official valuation. It’s a scam that can leave you shortchanged, warns Sell House Fast. They’ll promise to get the cash in your hands in a number of days, but will make excuses to drag the process on.

At the last moment, when you have no choice but to accept the offer, the cash buyer will drop the price significantly.

4. Title deed fraud

After stealing the identity of the homeowner, fraudsters transfer the title of a property to their name illegally. Once they have secured the transfer, they can commit further acts of fraud by selling the property for their profit.

HM Land Registry provides a free Property Alert service that you can sign up for to get alerts about changes to the register for your property.

5. Tenancy application fraud

Rogue prospective tenants provide false information on all or part of their tenancy application in order to obtain a property. This could involve using doctored forms and images, as well as forging signatures.

Once they have the property, they may illegally sublet it.

6. Fake property listings

Scammers will list fake properties in order to obtain deposits from unsuspecting renters or homebuyers.

In some cases, these properties don’t exist, in other cases, the properties do exist but are owned by someone else.

From: Property scams: what are they and how to avoid them – Which?.

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Lloyds Bank has warned that it received 29% more reports of conveyancing fraud in the second half of last year compared with the first half.

It also found that victims lost an average of £47,000 and around 45% of victims were aged 39 or under, signalling that first-time buyers may be most at risk.

From: Scammers steal home deposits in callous conveyancing scams – Which?.

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Merchants need identity

In a bid to augment the user journey for merchants, Noda introduced Pay & Go, a service which optimises the entire process into a single flow, supporting customers in scaling their sign-up conversion rates. In addition, by allowing users to complete registration, verify their identity, and conduct their first payment in a single experience, Pay & Go intends to augment merchant acquisition strategies while also improving the user experience, accelerating onboarding and making it more efficient.

From: Noda’s Pay & Go solution now available for merchants.

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Identity orchestration

 

Extending to AI

 

Know-Your-Agent, Know-Your-Business and Know-Your-Customer are the ABC of digital identity and representation a hugh opportunity for new players to provide orchestration, execution and new business models.

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Instead, 34% of Gen Z consumers obtain financial advice from TikTok and 33% get it from YouTube, while only 24% of this age group seek advice from financial advisors, according to marketing company Vericast. When it comes to Millennials, 13% get advice on TikTok. Another 22% head to YouTube, and 26% seek out advice from professionals.

From: Millennials, Gen Zers Are Gaining Wealth, But Advisors Aren’t Meeting Them Where They Are.

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So how is that working out for them?

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Investors lost billions of dollars in July betting on a handful of small US-listed Chinese stocks that plunged in value shortly after being heavily promoted on social media.

From: ‘I almost fell off my chair’: Investors lose billions on meme stocks as ‘pump and dump’ scams multiply.

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Instead of financial literacy, let’s get responsible AI into the loop.

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This specification defines a mechanism on top of OAuth 2.0 [RFC6749] for requesting and delivering Presentations of Credentials. Credentials and Presentations can be of any format, including, but not limited to W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model [VC_DATA], ISO mdoc [ISO.18013-5], and IETF SD-JWT VC [I-D.ietf-oauth-sd-jwt-vc].

From: OpenID for Verifiable Presentations 1.0.

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One password is believed to have been all it took for a ransomware gang to destroy a 158-year-old company and put 700 people out of work.
KNP – a Northamptonshire transport company – is just one of tens of thousands of UK businesses that have been hit by such attacks.
Big names such as M&S, Co-op and Harrods have all been attacked in recent months. The chief executive of Co-op confirmed last week that all 6.5 million of its members had had their data stolen.
In KNP’s case, it’s thought the hackers managed to gain entry to the computer system by guessing an employee’s password, after which they encrypted the company’s data and locked its internal systems.
KNP director Paul Abbott says he hasn’t told the employee that their compromised password most likely led to the destruction of the company.
“Would you want to know if it was you?” he asks.

From: Weak password allowed hackers to sink a 158-year-old company – BBC News.

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Last October, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) published the Personal Financial Data Rights final rule, giving Americans the right to instruct their banks to share their financial data with third party providers.

But, under the new administration’s leadership, in May the CFPB moved to have the rule rescinded in a decision that the Financial Technology Association (FTA) described as a “handout to Wall Street banks”.

Since then, it has emerged that JP Morgan is planning to impose fees on companies wanting to access its clients’ bank account data and has gone so far as sending pricing sheets to data aggregators – the intermediaries that link banks and fintechs.

In the letter to Trump, made public by the FTA, the open banking CEOS say: “Large banks are taking aggressive action to preserve their market position by imposing exorbitant new “account access” fees that would prevent consumers from connecting their accounts to better financial products of their choice.

The CEOs – from the likes of Brex, Chime, Klarna, Plaid and Sofi – also argue that such a move would cripple innovation in crypto, AI and digital wallets and payments.

From: Fintech CEOs call on Trump to block banks from imposing ‘account access’ fees.

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Silicon Valley is full of magical thinking. Those drawn to technological and scientific innovation tend to also be drawn to the fantastical, and it’s not always easy for them to tell which is which. After all, to be a truly great innovator, you must vividly imagine things which don’t exist and be certain that the world will be improved by them. You must be impervious to the rest of the world when it tells you your ideas are ridiculous. It helps to see yourself as the main character of an unfolding historical story. These characteristics are true of the start-up founder and the cult leader.

Tech executives are prone to grandiose, quasi-mystical rhetoric, and, as has often been observed, the mental model that many of them have of AGI is essentially a religious or supernatural one: something is coming, we know not what exactly, that will either save humanity or destroy it. Ilya Sutskever, the engineering visionary behind OpenAI who left the company last year to work on AI safety, told his staff in 2023 that the company needed to build a bunker to save its scientists and engineers – the elect – from the very technology they were working on. A former colleague said, “There is a group of people—Ilya being one of them—who believe that building AGI will bring about a rapture. Literally, a rapture.”

From: Rationalist Cults of Silicon Valley – by Ian Leslie.

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The UK Government’s upcoming reforms to the Money Laundering Regulations (MLRs) mark a major step forward in the adoption of digital identity across regulated sectors. With HM Treasury backing digital ID as a means to streamline checks and help meet the government’s aim of reducing compliance costs by 25%, the direction of travel is now clear: digital IDs are coming.

From: Why the MLR reforms are a green light for digital ID: By Tim Barnett.

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Only companies certified as Identity Service Providers (IDSPs) under the UK Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework can use the information in the GOV.UK Wallet and share it with another business to prove a user’s identity, so organisations must work through these providers for other IDV purposes.

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Content producers are also rethinking their business models. “The future of the internet is not all about traffic,” says Mr Chandrasekar, who has built up Stack Overflow’s enterprise-oriented subscription product, Stack Internal. News publishers are planning for “Google zero”, using newsletters and apps to reach customers who no longer come to them via search, and moving their content behind paywalls or to live events.

From: AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?.

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