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Wanna-be “influencers” targeted Scammers are often tripped up by the language gap Detecting patterns stops fraud The Action 10 News Troubleshooter Series took a look at a popular scam that “fishes” for potential influencers by offering to pay them in return for allowing a “decal wrap” advertising a popular energy drink on their automobile. In…

Scammers are opportunists COVID relief checks provided a “porthole” to scams Consumers need reminders to stay vigilant even in challenging times It is no surprise to note that scammers are, first and foremost, opportunists. When the United States government began issuing several rounds of stimulus checks, they were right there with complicated — and not-so-complicated…

PaymentsJournal offers a podcast wherein Patricia Rojas, Senior Manager Data Scientist at ACI Worldwide, and Tim Sloane, VP of Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group discuss the ways Machine Learning (ML) has become a vital component in the fight against fraud — particularly during the pandemic, when fraud rates have escalated.

There is no doubt that the pandemic has created opportunities for fraudsters. Atlas VPN reports that cybercrime cost the world more than $1 trillion in 2020, which works out to around 1% of global GDP. Access via online “pirating” to information like email addresses and social security numbers creates opportunities for phishing and other attacks.

Once again, we see evidence that the COVID pandemic boosted the frequency and sophistication of fraud activity. As tallied in the 2021 Treasury Fraud & Controls Survey by Strategic Treasurer and related by Omri Kletter, global VP for fraud and financial crime at Bottomline, a good deal of fraud is due to the contortions businesses had to make — in a hurry — to accommodate remote work.

Banks in New Jersey were taken for many thousands of dollars The scam was a fairly elaborate, multi-step affair $250,000 had been stolen before the scammers were caught We all know about scams involving passing fake or altered checks, but what about elaborate multi-step operations? Here’s an interesting “What if?” exercise — could your bank…

Stimulus and unemployment check proliferation requires higher-than-ever vigilance Scammers are using the phone to go after checks Which states are the biggest targets? As noted in this space previously, an unfortunate side-effect of the distribution of stimulus checks has been heightened activity by scammers attempting to take advantage of the situation via various fraud tactics.…