The Internet is Jammed. CyberHackers Wreck the Web.
The internet is like LA traffic on a Friday afternoon. It’s a parking lot and nobody is going anywhere fast. Today at least. DDOS attacks which many believe are being launched using a robot army of 1.5 million surveillance cameras are hitting the DNS backbone of the internet causing websites everywhere to become unreachable. The DDOS attacks […]
Read Letter Employee Sent Warning Wells of Fraud
An employee sent this letter to the CEO of Wells Fargo.
What’s Up Down Under? 1 in 4 Mortgages are Fraud.
Liar Loans. Here in the US we know this term all too well. Loans where borrowers lied about their income and employment were a major factor that lead to the demise of our mortgage market in 2009. We cleaned up our act and knocked out liar loans substantially by requiring multiple forms of verification of […]
Retailers Alerting Consumers About Reused Passwords
50% of consumers use the same password on their Facebook accounts, that they do on their Linkedin accounts and other services such as Uber, Amazon and Netflix. This is a real bad idea. A horrible idea actually, which puts consumers at heightened risk of identity theft, banking fraud and online fraud. How bad of an […]
Counterfeit Losses Drop 47% As Retailers Bring Up EMV
Visa is reporting that card issuers that have deployed Chip Cards have seen an average of 50% reduction in their counterfeit losses from this same time last year. With over half a billion Chip cards in circulation and millions of merchants accepting those cards, the US is now ranked as the top country in the […]
Good News, You’re Not Responsible for Fraud
The prepaid card industry is on fire. Having grown from $1 billion in 2003 to $112 billion estimated today it is the hottest financial product around. But as a consumer, I was always afraid to buy or use prepaid cards. It was always like carrying cash in your wallet which I never like to do. […]
Fake Call Center in India Busted for Big IRS Tax Fraud
Tipster Colleen Edwards of PowerMark reported some good news to me today and that is that a major fraud ring out of India has been busted for a massive fraud against US consumers. The fake call centers out of India were auto dialing hundreds of thousands of phone numbers daily, leaving messages to US citizens from purported […]
How Cameras Helped Hackers Raise A Big Robot Army
It isn’t often that your hobby and your career collide but recently that is just what happened to me. Photography is my hobby. Fraud and Security management is my profession. So when I learned that cameras were used to launch one of the largest cyber attacks in history, I was intrigued. It All Started with […]
MotionCode’s Dynamic CVV2 Will Kill CNP Fraud
I wrote a few weeks back about the rapid rise of Online Fraud. In 2016 fraud reports are up 400% thanks to BotNet attacks and the rollout of EMV technology. There just seems to be no end to the increases in CNP across the world and despite lots of controls and fraud tools there are […]
5 Fraud Schemes That Will Hurt You With ACH
Same Day ACH; All the fraud experts are predicting a big uptick in fraud when it goes into full effect one year from now. But the impacts could be felt even sooner as NACHA is reporting that 95% of banks are going to process both ACH debits and credits starting now. The volume of transactions is […]
40% of Consumers in the UK Were Victims of Card Fraud
The Financial Fraud Action Committee released a shocking statistic this week. Apparently over 5 million people in the UK were forced to close their card accounts after their accounts were compromised. The numbers indicate that 40% of all UK consumers fell victim to card fraud which is higher than the rates prior to the implementation […]
Half a Billion Records Hacked in Worst Breach in History
500 million records. That is 300 million more records than experts originally believed but Yahoo is reporting today that 500 million records were breached 2 years ago in what they believe was a state sponsored hack. A Russian hacker named ‘Peace” who was originally tied to the massive Linkedin Data Breach of 117 million records […]
US CNP Fraud Projected To Double With CHIP
Fraud is not static. You can’t put a fraud hurdle like CHIP cards in front of the fraudsters and not expect their behavior to change significantly to get around it. Industry experts are pointing to a growing type of fraud here in the US – Card Not Present – and advising that it is likely […]
Wells Fargo CEO Grilled Over Fraud And Gets Destroyed
I don’t think I have ever seen a congressional hearing that managed to so thoroughly destroy a CEO. There is a lot of frustration over the rampant fraud at Wells Fargo.
UK Fraud Rockets Up 53% in 2016
The Financial Fraud Action Committee has released their latest study on fraud in the UK and found that fraud attempts occur every 15 seconds. The study determined a huge increase in actual fraud attempts when comparing data from 2016 to 2015. A total of 1,007,094 cases of financial fraud (payment card, remote banking and cheque fraud) […]
How Rich Kids of Instagram Help Investigators
Yachts, champagne, cars, closets full of Gucci Bags and excessive glamour. If you haven’t checked out Rich Kids of Instagram you need to now. Rich Kids of Instagram might make your blood boil as you browse through picture after picture of entitled teens shamelessly sharing their excessive worth. They have more money than you will ever […]
Florida Dominates Mortgage Fraud Index
Core Logic, the mortgage analytics and research firm has published their latest updates on Mortgage Fraud in the US and Florida continues to be the epicenter of fraud. The CoreLogic Mortgage Fraud Index tracks application characteristics in their consortium, scores each application for risks of fraud and then aggregates those statistics to analyze the macro […]
Toxic Sales Culture Leads to Massive Firing at Wells Fargo
Wells Fargo just paid the largest penalty to the CFPB in history and it’s all because 5,300 employees setup close to half a billion phony credit card accounts and another 1.5 million banking accounts and services. You can download a copy of the complaint here and it is serious stuff – Wells Fargo Law-Suit Read […]
How Investor Uncovered Shady Loans at Lending Club
The devil is in the details. One savvy investor in the Lending Club discovered this when he began to do some due diligence on the innovative lending company earlier this year. He uncovered a systematic fraud attempt at the Lending Club by downloading loan details from their website and analyzing the approved loans for commonalities and inconsistencies. Those inconsistencies […]
Online Fraud Attempts Are Up Almost 400%
The Global Fraud Index published by Forter for Q3 2016 is out and it shows a massive uptick in the level of online fraud losses. From 2015 to 2016, fraudsters have been working overtime racking up more fraud attempts on a rate basis than we have seen for many years. The Global Fraud Index shows […]
In the Fight Against Fraud, Strong Leadership is Key
This article was printed in American Banker and expresses my views on the importance of strong fraud leadership – American Banker Article. With identity theft a top concern among American consumers and large-scale data breaches becoming unfortunately routine, banks must be more proactive than ever in the fight against fraud. One of the crucial steps […]