Snippings

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Postal workers are being offered £1,000 a week to steal bank cards, a BBC investigation has found.

From Post workers recruited by gangs to steal bank cards – BBC News

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“The banking customer today is being wooed by the richest men in top four economies of the world – USA (Jeff Bezos – Amazon Pay), China (Jack Ma – PayTM), India (Mukesh Ambani – Jio Money), and Japan (Masayoshi Son – Flipkart/PhonePe). “

Barbarians at the Gates: Consumer tech companies will eat banks’ lunch – The Economic Times

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In a growing number of online attacks, hackers have been calling up Verizon, T-Mobile U.S., Sprint and AT&T and asking them to transfer control of a victim’s phone number to a device under the control of the hackers.

From Identity Thieves Hijack Cellphone Accounts to Go After Virtual Currency – NYTimes.com

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“‘Age verification could lead to porn companies building databases of the UK’s porn habits, which could be vulnerable to Ashley Madison style hacks,’ argued Open Rights Group director Jim Killock.”

UK to implement age-verification system for porn sites | Ars Technica

This is indeed the case, and the inevitable outcome of the government’s “plan” as it stands. But it may not be the porn companies building the database of who prefers spanking to and prefers foot fetishism (hint: MPs). It may be the government. I heard the “Digital Minister” Matt Hancock interviewed on the BBC’s Today programme about his half-baked ideas. He said that people visiting porn sites could show their passports to gain access. This is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard a Minister say (and that’s against some pretty stiff competition) for two reasons: first off all it would lead to a massive increase in crime (identity theft, blackmail and so on) and it would also give the Home Office a treasure trove of personal data that they would find irresistible.

Suppose I decide to visit “The Honourable Members”. The web site operator, let’s call them “Filthy Fun” (registered in Mozambique), asks for my passport. Now, the only organisation that can verify whether a passport is valid or not is the Home Office. So, Filthy Fun sends my passport details to the Home Office and the Home Office checks them and tells Filthy Fun that the passport is valid. I’m logged. (Of course, Filthy Fun have no idea whether it’s me at the keyboard or not, but whatever.)

Note though that the Home Office now knows which porn sites I’m visiting.

I’ve written so many times 

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“The head of fintech partnerships and strategy at HSBC, Kaushalya Somasundaram, reiterated Jaffrey’s belief that USC could help delineate a path forward for central bank digital currencies, one of the reasons HSBC  joined to begin with.

Explaining how she sees the the token eventually working, Somasundaram told CoinDesk:

‘The settlement coin will be a collateralized digital currency, backed by cash assets at a central bank, which allows us to transfer ownership easily through the exchange of USCs, thus reducing process complexity and the time taken for settlement.'”

HSBC, Barclays Join Settlement Coin as Bank Blockchain Test Enters Final Phase – CoinDesk

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This is a guy who knows a guy, a middleman in the black market for Instagram verification, where anyone from a seasoned publicist to a 22-year-old digital marketer will offer to verify an account—for a price. The fee is anywhere from a bottle of wine to $15,000

From Inside the black market where people pay thousands of dollars for Instagram verification

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The expanded analysis reviewed more than 165 million retail banking accounts opened over a nearly eight-year period – from January 2009 through September 2016 – and identified a new total of approximately 3.5 million potentially unauthorised consumer and small business accounts.

From Wells Fargo fake bank account scam gets bigger » Banking Technology

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“Under the concept, a group of ATMs serves as nodes within a Blockchain-powered network. There they share transactions via a distributed database, maintaining a high degree of security and uptime.”

Major Payment Processor Files Patent for Blockchain-based ATM Network

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“Alipay, WeChat Wallet, and other Chinese third party payment platforms use financial incentives to encourage users to take money out of their bank accounts and temporarily store it on the platform itself.”

China’s Future is Definitely Cashless – The News Lens International Edition

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“Social networks should be obliged to ban anonymous accounts. If they refuse to do so voluntarily, government regulators should force the issue.”

Facebook and Twitter Are Too Big to Allow Fake Users

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