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That information includes names, contact information, dates of birth, national identification numbers, copies of government-issued identification documents, other identification documents such as utility bills, bank account numbers, MoneyGram Plus Rewards numbers, transaction information and, for a limited number of consumers, and criminal investigation information.

From: MoneyGram says hackers stole customer data.

Wait, what? The hackers got “criminal investigation information”? That sounds like it could be worth quite a bit of money to criminals!

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The sheer volume of data out there, the hacked credentials, the Social Security numbers and the fake IDs are fodder for scammers to pose as someone else in a bid to commit fraud. The Identity Theft Resource Center estimated that there were about 1.1 billion data breach victims in the first half of 2024, an increase of 490% compared to the first half of 2023.

From: Stop Real Estate Fraud: Is the Government-Issued ID Fake?.

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As David Birch points out in Forbes, templates “are much more secure because they do not store the biometric itself but an abstraction of it.” It does not eliminate the risk, he notes, but it dramatically reduces the ease, cost-effectiveness and scalability of attacks based on stolen templates.

From: The fallacy of hacked face biometrics’ vulnerability | Biometric Update.

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Online gaming sits atop an unregulated, complex, financial ecosystem. Forget earning a few quid washing cars and deciding whether to spend it on football stickers or save for later – kids are entering the world of money online, alone. And they find a universe of message board NFT offers and dodgy in-game loot box trades.

Predictably, loads of them are getting scammed, ripped off, and duped. And no-one seems to care.

From: Kids are getting constantly scammed online too.

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Some troves of bitcoin are particularly susceptible to quantum thievery. In bitcoin’s early days, it was held in addresses with exposed public keys, including the roughly one million coins believed to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin’s mysterious creator. Some 1.72 million bitcoins—valued at more than $160 billion at current prices—are held in such addresses,

From: A Looming Threat to Bitcoin: The Risk of a Quantum Hack – WSJ.

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But big tech companies won’t give up control over identity easily. By integrating elements of decentralized identity—such as verifiable credentials—and shifting parts of AI training and inference to users’ devices, they can address privacy concerns while preserving their gatekeeping role, ultimately reducing the value of decentralization. Governments will also want to retain significant control over digital identity, as it is crucial for law enforcement, national security, taxation, and the delivery of public services

From: Can Crypto’s Scarcity Tame AI’s Infinite Abundance?.

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But big tech companies won’t give up control over identity easily. By integrating elements of decentralized identity—such as verifiable credentials—and shifting parts of AI training and inference to users’ devices, they can address privacy concerns while preserving their gatekeeping role, ultimately reducing the value of decentralization. Governments will also want to retain significant control over digital identity, as it is crucial for law enforcement, national security, taxation, and the delivery of public services.

From: Can Crypto’s Scarcity Tame AI’s Infinite Abundance?.

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The missing funds show how Silicon Valley’s push to revolutionize consumer finance hasn’t quite lived up to its lofty expectations. While fintechs proclaim themselves as new banking products, many aren’t actual banks and rely instead on old-fashioned lenders, like Evolve. Even though Evolve is FDIC-insured, the bank isn’t the one that failed, so deposit insurance doesn’t apply.

Lorena Baculima signed up with Juno, a Synapse customer, which offered to pay her 5% interest on her cash deposits. She put approximately $130,000 into an account with a routing number belonging to Evolve Bank.

When she tried to use those funds in May to make a down payment on a house, she couldn’t access the money. In late November, Evolve told Baculima it only had $1,182 in her name.

“I thought my funds would be safe because they were in an FDIC-insured account,” Baculima said. “Nobody has been standing up for us. In my opinion, everyone involved is responsible.”

From: Evolve Bank, the Bank Behind the Fintech Revolution, Stumbles After Customer Funds Go Missing – WSJ.

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An AI Needs a Wallet of One’s Own to Act Agentically

From: Big Ideas in Tech for 2025 | Andreessen Horowitz.

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Sheila Bair, a former chair of the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, says that the big banks are “no doubt grumbling to Musk” about the CFPB, but notes that they have benefited from its efforts to oversight to the non-bank financial service providers (including, if Mr. Musk has his way of course, X) who compete with them.