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BEC, or business email compromise, is a species of scam that has been around for as long as businesses have used email. However, the sharp spike in remote working arrangements (including permanent changes to remote work) spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic has made it a much more tempting (and fruitful) target for scamsters. Attackers are taking advantage of the new need for off-site communications from employee home networks to their employers’ corporate networks.
Ingo Money CEO Drew Edwards spent some time with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster talking about distributed banking — aka banking-as-a-service — and how it differs from open banking. Edwards said that open banking is mostly about moving information, not about moving money between a consumer, her bank, and a third party, like the Robinhood app — at least for now. That data exchange makes it possible for a FinTech to step into the middle of the transaction but also makes the bank little more than the “dumb pipes” that serve as the funding source.
As 2021 gets underway — already fairly eventfully — Trace Fooshee of Aite Group talks to BankInfo Security’s Nick Holland about what fraud trends they foresee in the coming year. Mr. Fooshee notes that, early in the pandemic, FI consensus was to gird themselves for a significant rise in across-the-board fraud activity. However, the industry was somewhat surprised to see that conventional fraud — debit fraud, check fraud, etc. — did not spike all at once.
The trading platform Blocktrade recently published their predictions for the coming year in the fintech and payment worlds. “We all know that 2020 was a highly unusual year – the Covid pandemic not only impacted the global economy, it also accelerated ongoing changes and developments in the Fintech and Payment industry.”
It was suspected cockfighting that got the attention of authorities at first. However, they found a wider spectrum of crime when they arrived at the home of this alleged perpetrator: “When MDPD arrived, they found evidence that made plain the home also doubled as the headquarters for a second illegal business: counterfeit check cashing,” U.S. prosecutors wrote in a court filing.
We have seen the banking and payments industries recover from the challenges of the COVID-19 Pandemic with a resurgence of checks and sustained volumes of other payments. With this recovery, banks and financial institutions can now refocus on automation and fraud prevention projects which have been delayed while the economy recovers.
While Bitcoin cryptocurrency has been for many years held at arms length by mainstream consumers — it’s been considered volatile because of how much and how quickly its value can change, and the 2018 Bitcoin crash is still fresh in the mind of the industry — there are signs that it is gaining more widespread acceptance.
Craigslist can be a handy resource for buying and selling goods and services — and it is also a very popular vehicle for scammers deploying simple check fraud tactics. On YouTube, Traveling Director demonstrated a common Craigslist scam by offering some furniture for sale. His asking price was $300, but he had “buyers” consistently send checks for much, much larger amounts of money. It’s interesting to see the range of quality in the forgeries — a couple of the checks he received are downright amateurish.
Last week, we took a deep dive into a video by Mythbusters on CPU vs GPU, detailing how GPU provides a higher rate of speed and accuracy than CPU, essential for check processing and fraud detection. But, why are GPU processors necessary for artificial intelligence and machine learning?
We have to admit feeling a bit of satisfaction when seeing a scammer get scammed. That’s why this YouTube video is so entertaining. Wanting to document a step-by-step scam — and trip up the scammer at the same time — YouTuber Ben Taylor, whose channel is called Pleasant Green, is known for scam-baiting and scam-foiling. He tried to be voluntarily sucked into a classic “job posted on the internet” scam after hearing about a friend-of-a-friend being entangled.