The Billion Dollar Scam

From the BBC World Service. Investigative reporter Simona Weinglass leads a #BBCEye investigation into a criminal network, believed to have scammed more than a billion dollars from victims across the globe. The organisation sponsored a top-tier football club to promote its online trading platform, promising investors the chance of astonishing returns. But what lies behind the claims? The search – from a mansion in London, to a forest in Scandinavia and a call centre in Georgia – reveals a web of deceit. We hear from victims, undercover agents and police, in a bid to track down who’s in charge.

Retailers Grapple With a Spate of Smash-and-Grab Robberies

A spike in smash-and-grab robberies is driving retailers to find new ways to boost security and protect merchandise this holiday shopping season. Retailers say organized crime incidents have risen during the pandemic.

 

Can our technology really be trusted?

A cyber-attacker outsmarts a “smart contract”

From The Economist –

“IS IT theft if no rules are broken? That is what users of the DAO, a futuristic investment fund, were left pondering after June 17th, when an unknown attacker made off with around 3.6m “ether”, an online currency similar to bitcoin. As cyber-heists go, it was a big one: the ether were worth about $55m at the time of the attack, about a third of the DAO’s assets. But the DAO, which stands for Decentralised Autonomous Organisation, does not have rules as such, or staff to enforce them: instead, it has computer code, which is supposed to embody its purpose and to operate automatically. If the attacker found a flaw in the code, whose fault is that? Indeed, some cyber-libertarians are arguing that whereas the heist was not a crime, altering digital ledgers to retrieve the lost ether would be an affront to the whole project.”

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How much ATM bombings costs SA banks

From Business Tech –

“ATM bombings have cost local banks at least R40 million rand so far in 2015.

This is according to EWN, citing the South African Bank Risk Information Center (Sabric).

Sabric CEO, Kalyani Pillay told EWN that, while ATM bombings have declined 27%, the company has seen an “increase in advanced methods used by criminals to carry out the robberies”.

The South African Police Service released crime statistics for 2015, last month, showing that bank robbery was down 19.0%, while robbery of cash in transit was down 17.9%.

Rand Daily Mail reported that overall, banks lost about R100-million more than in 2014, to R300-million in 2015 from all forms of robbery.”

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Mobile Payments Surge Could Opens Door to New Era of Phishing Attacks

From The Csuite –

 
“The mobile payments industry continues to surge in volume - there is a risk that it will spark a new wave of phishing attacks suggests one industry specialists.

At Agari, we predict that the rapid adoption of new mobile payment systems will drive a spike in the volume of phishing emails aimed at payment customers in the later half of 2015.

Last year, our ‘State of Email Trust’ report, which measures the amount of fraudulent email sent using a company’s domain, revealed that the payments industry had a ThreatScore of under two until the second half of the year, when the number jumped up to 23 in Q3 and 39 in Q4.

This makes payments customers almost 13 times more likely to be attacked by malicious emails in Q4. European banks also saw their ThreatScore rise from 2 in Q1 to 30 in Q3.”

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