Crime

I blogged recently that there is around $1.6 trillion of money laundering globally and less than 2% is caught by the financial system.  That’s a stunning amount and makes you wonder why our system is so awful.  Much of it is down to the fact that account openings depend upon physical documentation and human checks. …

I wrote a while ago about the amazing digital identity scheme in India called Aadhaar.  It’s a card-based biometric scheme using a centralised database.  Of course, today, they would have developed the scheme on a mobile wallet with a distributed ledger but hey, you can’t win them all.  Some say that this just illustrates how…

It was really interesting listening to Jamie Woodruff, The Ethical Hacker, talking about how he can break into anyone’s system.  It’s pretty easy when you know how.  His discussion shows just how easy it is, if you have confidence to con.  This reminded me of Tony Sales who spoke at the Financial Services Club three…

We’ve seen some pretty strong attacks on banks cyberdefences in the past year. Three major incidents in the SWIFT network; 50 at the Federal Reserve; problems at the Bank of England and many other central banks; a major incident at the Danish payment processorNETS; and big banks like HSBC and JPMorgan have all been affected. Admittedly,…

According to latest stats, China’s FinTech markets are booming in 2016. Over $10 billion went into FinTech firms in China in the first half of 2016, although half of that was Ant Financial followed closely by Lu and JD Finance. China’s Fintech 50 by KPMG (download the full report here) What intrigues is that this…

Apparently, I am a miscreant.  I am the one guy who managed to break PayPal.  What?  OK, here’s the story.  The next 2,000 words tell the story but, if you’d rather miss that and cut to the chase, jump to the end. Most of my customers wire me the money.  American customers are more of…

I was tempted to blog about Bitcoin 3.0 this morning, but Marcus Swanepoel has already done that – news of Bitcoin’s death has been overstated – so I thought I’d blog about robbery instead.  Daylight robbery is far more exciting than investing in the future after all, and there has been a big case over here…

I wake up today with the usual massive dump of emails, two of which looked a bit suspect.  The first is from DHL, saying my shipment is cancelled.  I don’t use DHL and expect no shipment from them, so delete it.  The second is an email from Transport for London with a PDF attachment. It’s…

Building upon this theme of anonymity it’s worth talking for a minute about the Darknet.  It sounds like something out of Star Wars, but is all about ToR and the ability to surf without leaving a digital footprint.  This is the world of Silk Road, as detailed in the recent case study from Wired, and gives an…