Advance fee fraud scams go round and round. It's been a while since the "I was in government and I have a huge secret profit from over-invoicing" fraud came around but it's back and it's libelling the head of a central bank. Or, it would be if she hadn't died last year.
As governments around the world ponder the possibility of making banks liable for losses suffered by customers who are the victims of e.g. phishing scams, there are companies that actively assist the fraudsters to get away with it. Let's start at the top: Google.
Clearview AI Inc. is a company that collects facial images from a disparate range of sources and makes them available to its customers.
The UK's data protection department, the Information Commissioner's Office, has banned the practice within the UK. The UK acted in concert with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. The investigations focused on Clearview AI Inc’s use of people’s images, data scraping from the internet and the use of biometric data for facial recognition.
What effect might that have on remote verification?
This week, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has signed three Bills, bring them into law. Bucking the global trend to try to incorporate multiple aspects of financial crime law into a single piece of legislation, the new Acts are the Money Laundering (Prevention and Prohibition) Act, 2022, the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act, 2022, and the Proceeds of Crime (Recovery and Management) Act, 2022. But the word of the day is "irony."
Watching American motor racing always smacks of a trick when, not long before the end, a safety car comes out and everyone bunches up. Why not just to five lap sprint races because at the end of the day, that's all the racing that counts. So when one hears a TV commentator at the inaugural Miami Grand Prix say that we need a safety car to spice things up, there's a horrible sinking feeling, and a sour taste after the safety-car led debacle in the Abu Dhabi GP 2021.
The US Supreme Court has suffered a leak of a draft judgment prepared during the discussion phase of the deliberations of the Court. It is several months old and may or may not be the way the Court decides.
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has issued a warning that customers of WeLab Bank are the target of a phishing scam. WeLab prides itself on being Hong Kong's "only home grown virtual bank." But it's more than a bank so the scam has potentially much wider implications.
Those with long memories will remember the well-worn name of Andre Coker. It's been used in a variety of spam-scams but, at least insofar as it's reached us, been unused for some time. But it's back and Andre is a woman now.
