I am so blessed. This chap has purloined money from a cryptocurrency account and wants to send it to me. So he chose an address at antimoneylaundering.net.
If you were to receive mail from a government URL, you'd give it the time of day. Everyone would.
But this fake investment scam uses an address owned by the government of Paraguay as its spoofed "from" address. And, of course, it uses a free any anonymous e-mail address to collect responses from its victims.
And behind the spam-scam is a far more sophisticated scheme. We scrape away the stinky stuff and lay bare the fraudulent scheme.
German software company SAP SE has done a deal with the USA's OFAC to avoid court proceedings relating to transactions with Iran. But that's not the important part of this story: what matters is that services were provided "in the cloud" and OFAC claims jurisdiction over it.
MoneyGram has agreed to pay to the US Treasury via the Office of Foreign Assets Control the sum of USD34,328.78 "to settle its potential civil liability for 359 apparent" breaches. So, the US government once more says "give us money and we won't sue you so you get named and shamed but no actual criminal record.
Australia: the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission has issued a public warning notice about the conduct of Postage Ink Pty Limited in relation to the unsolicited supply of labels and ink cartridges and other consumables for postage meters to business customers.
Google is threatening to kill Android phones if users do not provide personal information.
There are several versions of the threat issued by Google where its persuasion has failed.
Google is facing two problems: first, its own message demands the information and then says it will be used to the customer's detriment and secondly, people no longer trust it.
This morning, I was sitting in a coffee shop drinking lovely local coffee looking out at Citi 's large Malaysian head office in KualaLumpur . Then I looked at the news.
Citi is to leave Malaysia but maintain its offices in Singapore.
Marc Antrim, 43, of South El Monte, and others walked into a marijuana warehouse in Los Angeles and walked out with half a ton of weed and USD600,000 in cash. Then they distributed the drugs. Antrim was a police officer and one of his co-accused was an employee of the warehouse.
There's an actor called Zachary Joseph Horwitz. He's also known as Zach Avery. He lives in a place called Berverlywood. Honestly. It's not Beverly (sic) Hills and it's not Hollywood. Actors, at least the good ones, are skilled at creating an illusion. What you see is not supposed to be real.
So what happens when an actor takes those skills away from the stage? The answer is... he gets arrested for fraud. And then the Federal Bureau of Investigation gets excited and issues a media release worthy of a hyperbolic - and grammatically dubious - studio. But under that, there's actually a good story.
The USA's Securities and Exchange Commission has obtained an asset freeze and other emergency relief in an emergency civil (i.e. not criminal court) enforcement action against Los Angeles-based actor Zachary Horwitz and his company, 1inMM (one in a million) Capital, LLC in connection with an alleged Ponzi scheme that raised over USD690 million. Horwitz and 1inMM allegedly told investors that they were buying film rights, purportedly to resell them to Netflix and HBO; in fact, 1inMM actually had no business relationship with either company.
This article is going to make a lot of people very angry. Sadly, those that are going to be angry are those that have been found out; those that should be angry - the consumers who have been misled and the tax payers who have supported the rampant charge into FinTech support by regulators and, even, the banks who have had their business models and even management plans disrupted, in the true sense of the word, by the host of millennial-targeting banks that pretended they were not banks, supported in that subterfuge by regulators - are not going to be angry.
