A library of snippets
xxx
Amina Ali Adan was born in the Kenyan town of Garissa, 65 miles away from Dadaab, one of the world’s largest refugee camps, situated near the Somali border. She is just one of tens of thousands of Kenyan citizens who have been registered as refugees — many while children. Now in her 30s and a mother of three, her life is defined by her lack of a Kenyan national ID.
In Kenya, thousands left in limbo without ID cards – Coda Story:
xxx
xxx
“Estimates suggest that not even 1% of criminal funds flowing through the international financial system is confiscated,” says Colin Bell, group head of financial crime risk at HSBC.
What’s the new weapon against money laundering gangsters? – BBC News:
xxx
xxx
Money laundering accounts for up to 5% of global GDP – or $2tn (£1.5tn) – every year, says the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
What’s the new weapon against money laundering gangsters? – BBC News:
xxx
xxx
the great strategic risk for banks is competition from big tech, said Rafael Schiozer, a professor of economics at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo
Brazil’s banks face pincer threat from big tech and fintech | Financial Times:
xxx
xxx
During its rise, Bitcoin has taken the shape of one justly maligned form of “incumbent” organization: the religious cult. Like many digital anti-institutional organizations, Bitcoin hollows out the practices of what had already been a massively corrupt and dangerous organizational form—that is, an organized cult like Scientology—and replaces them with remarkably thin simulacra. To begin with, the language used to maintain belief in Bitcoin is viciously circular, self-justifying, wildly metaphorical, and difficult if not impossible to link to fact. And as with many cults, those selling this gospel most vociferously are also those who stand to profit disproportionately from its acceptance—an interest they fail to disclose in their evangelism.
Unlike traditional cults, though, Bitcoin has no specific creed, no single geographic location, and no truly identifiable belief system—other than Bitcoin itself.
xxx
xxx
About four-fifths of all payments in the cash-strapped southern African economy go through mobile money,
Zimbabwe suspends mobile money transactions | Financial Times:
xxx
xxx
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) wants more power to require ID from travelers (“credentialing”), control who is and who is not allowed to exercise their right to travel (“vetting”), and use and share information about travelers with more third parties and for more purposes (“expanded data use”).
From TSA wants more authority for ID demands, “vetting”, and data use – Papers, Please!:
xxx
xxx
Since the introduction of the first Bitcoin ATM in 2013, more than 8,000 machines have now been installed in over 75 countries—a sure fire indication of healthy growth in the cryptocurrency industry.
xxx
xxx
Merchants paid issuers $53.6 billion in Visa and Mastercard credit-card interchange fees in 2019, more than double what they paid in 2012, according to the Nilson Report, a trade publication. The growth reflects two things. First, credit-card use rose in recent years: Americans made 67% more credit-card payments in 2018 than in 2012, according to the Federal Reserve. Second, banks rolled out more cards with higher interchange fees to pay more rewards.
From The Credit-Card Fees Merchants Hate, Banks Love and Consumers Pay – WSJ:
xxx
xxx
On April 1, 2018, the CFO at Unatrac received a phishing email containing a link, which when clicked on, redirected the CFO to a phishing site that was designed to look like a legitimate Microsoft Office365 login page. The CFO unknowingly entered his login credentials on the fake web page, giving the criminals access to his credentials and, in turn, his entire account, according to the FBI affidavit.
Okeke and others accessed the CFO’s Office365 account 464 times between April 6 and April 20, 2018, mostly from IP addresses located in Nigeria, the FBI says. They sent fraudulent wire transfer requests from the account to Unatrac’s financial team. To add credibility to their requests, the cybercriminals would send fake invoices to the CFO’s account from external accounts and forward them to the finance team, the affidavit adds.
To hide their activities from the CFO, the conspirators created or modified the email filter rules for the account, intercepted legitimate emails from the finance team, marked them as read and moved them to another folder outside the inbox, the FBI says.
The finance team at Unatrac processed 15 payments to overseas accounts, totaling a sum of about $11 million, most of which could not be recovered by the time the company discovered the fraud, according to the affadavit.
From Nigerian Entrepreneur Pleads Guilty in $11 Million BEC Scam:
xxx
Snippings