Cheque deposits on your mobile phone

Mobile banking is moving fast – especially in the land of the cheque – the United States.

Chase has introduced a new mobile banking service – depositing your old fashioned paper cheque using your mobile phone. This has been achieved by using an application for Apples iPhone that allows bank customers to deposit cheques with the camera-enabled smartphone.

This means no more trips to a local bank branch or ATM or having the hassle with deposit slips. Customers of Chase simply use their phones' cameras to snap pictures of the front and back of the endorsed cheques and electronically send them to the bank.

The technology, called "remote deposit capture," is gaining popularity among many banks and credit unions.

More common than mobile applications are programs that allow customers to deposit cheques with their home computer scanners. Several local financial institutions have such programs or plan to start them soon.

Ghanaian postal officer charged with remittance theft

A female Assistant Postal Officer of the Ghana Post at Suame in charge of the Western Union Money Transfer Service, accused of embezzling GH¢278,555 belonging to the Agricultural Development Bank (ADB), has appeared before a circuit court in Kumasi, charged with stealing.

Louisa Osei-Agyemang is said to have connived with some customers of the Western Union Money Transfer service of the ADB to inflate remittances and pocketed the difference.

She pleaded not guilty to the charge and the court, presided over by Mr. R.M. Kogyapwah, admitted her to a GH¢270,000 bail with two sureties to be justified. She is to reappear on September 22.

Corporal Godwin Ahianyo of the Ashanti Regional Police Public Relations Unit said Ms Osei-Agyemang’s activities came to light during an audit when it was detected that the total money advanced to the office for clearance did not tally with the amount of money expected to be released to customers.

A further examination of the books revealed that between January 2009 and early August this year, some of the customers were paid remittances far in excess of what they were due.

Cpl Ahianyo said a report was made to the Regional Accountant of the Ghana Post and Ms Osei-Agyemang was invited to the regional office to explain the unbalanced amount. The regional accountant referred the case to the police.

Mr Ahianyo said Ms osei-Agyeman was initially granted a police enquiry bail, but after preliminary investigations, she was re-arrested last Wednesday and appeared before the court.

More than a million WebPages hit by SQL attacks

Over 1 million WebPages were infected in the course of an attack that can expose users to malware exploits. Among these websites there are at least two that belong to Apple. The SQL injection attacks bombard the websites of legitimate companies with database commands that attempt to add hidden links that lead to malware exploits.

“These attacks have been ongoing and are changing pretty often,” said Mary Landesman, a senior researcher with ScanSafe, a Cisco-owned service that provides customers with real-time intelligence about malicious sites. “Interestingly, many of the sites compromised have been involved in repeated compromises over the past few months. It's not clear whether these are the work of the same attackers or are competing attacks.”

SQL injection attacks succeed because web applications don't properly filter search queries and other user-supplied input for malicious text. When the data is processed, commands are passed to a website's backend server, causing it to add links or cough up sensitive information.

The attacks that hit Apple used highly encoded text strings to sneak past web-application filters.

The exploits used this time around weren't as effective as they might have been. According to Landesman, many of the iframes buried into the websites contained HTML that couldn't be rendered.

Doing a web search? Take care about what you look for

This year Cameron Diaz took the first place in the list of most dangerous search clues to be typed in the search engine query according to an annual McAfee report. Last year the top of the list was occupied by Jessica Biel.

If you look for any of the celebrities in the McAfee's annual list of the most dangerous stars to search for on the Web you risk to have a virus installed on your PC after you press some links in the search results.

"It's sort of a little bit of rivalry from the traditional world going to the cyber world," said Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee's vice president of threat research. "It's fascinating how cyber criminals can be so in tune with the popularity of various actresses and models. …They're actually a fantastic barometer of their popularity."

McAfee published the rankings of the riskiest websites every year using its free software SiteAdvisor. Its 2010 study, which McAfee has just released, found that users have a 19 percent chance of landing on a malicious site when they search the Web for "Cameron Diaz." Searching for pictures and downloads of the actress gives you a 10 percent chance of reaching a site infected with spyware, adware, spam, phishing, viruses and other cyber traps that can harm your computer or steal personal information.

Alperovitch said that even though celebrity searches were safer overall this year, searching for Diaz is even riskier than searching for Biel.

"She's been in the spotlight recently with a number of blockbuster movies, "Knight and Day," of course, with Tom Cruise," he said. "What we see is that we people who are in the news recently… they tend to be at the top of the list because they're on peoples' minds. People tend to go on Google and Bing and search for them after they've watched their movies. Cyber criminals realize that very well and target people when they do this."

The full list of the most dangerous names to search on the web is as follows:

1. Cameron Diaz
2. Julia Roberts
3. Jessica Biel
4. Gisele Bundchen
5. Brad Pitt
6. Adriana Lima
7. Jennifer Love Hewitt, Nicole Kidman
8. Tom Cruise

Filipino workers in Switzerland hit by money scam

Filipinos in Canton Vaud and surrounding areas in Switzerland are angry over the money they lost through a remittance firm in Geneva.

The Filipino Community in Canton Geneva & Vaud have registered complaints against a local money remittance firm, which, they said, has defrauded overseas Filipino workers since it opened office in Geneva in 2009.

The firm reportedly entices Filipino workers through SMS by offering a higher money exchange rate for their remittances. However, the remittances were never made. The scam continues because many victims are undocumented Filipinos who are reluctant to file complaints with the authorities.

“Many of their clients are undocumented OFWs, and some are also their friends who chose not to make a complaint,” said Raymund-Michael Flores, founder the local Filipino community organization.

In a statement dated August 11, 2010 by “Erica” of Florissant, Geneva, she claimed that she sent 13,500 Swiss Francs last October 22, 2009 through the firm.

Erica said only P20,000 was forwarded to her account 3 months after she sent the money.

“I thought of cancelling my transaction (but) they keep on promising that it will be returned in no time,” said Erica. The group forwarded Erica’s letter to ABS-CBN Europe News Bureau.

The local Filipino community organization claimed that the frim has not only victimized Filipino workers in Switzerland, but also in the Philippines.

Remittances to Bulgaria reach new highs

Remittances from migrant workers are a lifeline to large sections of the Bulgarian economy, particularly the retail trade and the housing market. There has been a noticeable increase in the amount of remittances from Bulgarians working abroad over the last according to a new report.

Remittances from Bulgarians working abroad totaled € 702.5 million for the period June 2009 to June 2010, according to data from the Bulgarian Central Bank.

Studies show that the actual money sent home are about 30-40% higher that the official figures.

According to the World Bank, Bulgaria has one of the highest proportions of its population working abroad of any country in the world. In 2009 approximately one and a half million Bulgarians are based abroad, equal to 15% of the population. The largest Bulgarian communities are based in Spain, Germany, Greece, Italy, Romania and Turkey.

Remittances in the Gulf set to rise after fall-off

Western Union expects the amount of money that foreign workers in the Gulf transfer home to rebound next year after remittances declined in the second quarter of 2010.

Although remittance flows from the region should improve next year they were unlikely to return just yet to the peaks of the economic boom, said Christina Gold, the chief executive and president of Western Union.

Globally, remittances to developing countries are expected to rise by about 6.2 per cent this year before increasing again next year to reach a record high of at least US$350 billion.

“From our perspective, we see this as a challenging region in 2010 but we see opportunities coming into next year and see growth rebounding in the region,” she said.

“We are not seeing the growth we saw and seeing it pretty much steady on to last year’s numbers.”

Widely viewed as a shadow sector to banking, the money transfer industry enables migrant workers to send money to their families, who can pick up the funds either through transfer agents or through the internet.

Remittances from the region declined last year after the global financial crisis prompted a wave of redundancies. Workers in the Gulf’s property sector suffered especially as a drop in construction projects meant there was less demand for low-skilled migrant labour, who account for a large percentage of those who use money transfer services.

With activity remaining largely sluggish in the construction sector, money transfer transactions from foreign breadwinners are expected to finish the year at a similar level to last year. Western Union experienced a moderate decline in transactions in the Gulf states in the second quarter of the year.

Money transfer flows provide a useful gauge of the health of the global economy, with remittances often among the first to be affected once the economic outlook begins to slow.

“In some parts of the world it’s a leading indicator and other parts of the world it’s a lagging indicator,” said Mrs Gold.

Remittance flows from the US to Mexico dropped long before other signs emerged of a deceleration in the US economy, she said.

In contrast, in Dubai the company began to see a decline in transfers about 12 months after economic indicators first showed evidence of the global financial crisis hitting the emirate.

“The more remittances are dependent on customers in a lot of different industries, it tends to be more of a lagging indicator,” she said.

While Russia and the US, in particular, were now showing signs of a pick-up in transfers, evidence from other countries showed they were still struggling to emerge from the financial crisis.

With unemployment running at up to 20 per cent in Spain, remittances from the country had yet to improve, she said.

Until last year, the US payment services company’s business in the Gulf had grown at double-digit levels as the region underwent an economic transformation requiring the employment of a high volume of workers from overseas.