IF TRUE HORRIFYING AND FUNNY BOTH: Russia appears to confuse ‘The Sims’ for SIM cards in possible staged assassination attempt.
Open Letter from Former Defense, Intelligence, Homeland Security, and Cyber Officials Calling for National Security Review of Congressional Tech Legislation (PDF) James R. Clapper, Jane Harman, Jeh C. Johnson, Michael J. Morell, Leon E. Panetta, Admiral Michael S. Rogers, Frances F. Townsend
Obama points finger at tech companies for disinformation in major speech The Hill. Maybe somebody could just write up the Official Narrative and post it somewhere? So we could be sure whatever we were saying was safe?
CNN+ Is Shutting Down One Month After Launch (EXCLUSIVE) Variety
- “Down one path is understanding the humanities foremost as knowledge work… Down the other path is understanding the humanities as a kind of pure activism committed to rejecting the values that govern institutional and civic credibility” — Aaron Hanlon (Colby) on the “credibility crisis” facing the humanities
- “We all must take a more active role as consumers in how these technologies are developed” — novelist-professor Sam Lipsyte (Columbia) writes amusingly about his trip to Vegas to hear a philosopher & a sex-technologist talk about sex robots, and maybe try out the tech himself
- Socrates said that studying philosophy was preparation for dying — at one (and only one) university in North America, undergraduates can cut out the middleman and just major in death
- “Many Russians are not to blame for the war or the atrocities. Living under a draconian authoritarian regime, they are manipulated by a powerful propaganda machine and they face harsh punishment if they protest” — still, sanctions that may harm them are justified, argue Avia Pasternak (UCL) & Zofia Stemplowska (Oxford)
- “To create a truly secure (and permanent) encryption method, we need a computational problem that’s hard enough to create a provably insurmountable barrier for adversaries.” How can we tell if such a problem exists? — the epistemology of the possibility of cryptography
- New: “In the CAVE: An Ethics Podcast”. It “explores some of the big ethical and philosophical issues facing contemporary societies” — from the Macquarie University Research Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics (CAVE), it’s on Spotify and other podcast platforms
- “Once you read these critiques, it becomes painfully obvious that the Dunning-Kruger effect is a statistical artifact. But to date, very few people know this fact” — a step by step explanation of the problem with one of psychology’s most famous findings
International enforcement effort takes down RaidForums, one of the world’s largest online forum of hackers
- Had 500,000+ members
- Sold credit card and bank account info stolen in breaches
- Efforts by US, Portugal, UK, Sweden, Romania
Seattle: Ukrainian man gets 5 years prison for his role in hacking group that got 20 million credit card numbers; hit those in the US, Canada, UK, France and Australia; costs resulting over $1 billion
BBB Studies. Here are links to the studies I’ve written for the Better Business Bureau: puppy fraud, romance fraud; BEC fraud, sweepstakes/lottery fraud, tech support fraud, romance fraud money mules, crooked movers, government imposters, online vehicle sale scams, rental fraud, gift cards, job scams, online shopping fraud, and crypto scams
Fraud News Around the world
- UK Action Fraud reports £50 million lost last year to tech support scams
- Majority of Nigerians in federal prison in the US are there for fraud
- UK: Two men get prison for laundering money for a timeshare resale fraud
- Toronto man charged with fraud in grandparent scam
- Canada: RCMP closes down task force Octavia project aimed at phone scammers
- Action by WalMart against gift cards purchased by older victims of government imposter scams allows DOJ to freeze $4 million of them
- EFCC in Nigeria arrests five for internet fraud
- Wired: Scope and nature of fraud in Nigeria
- Google sues operator of pet scams who is located in Cameroon
- North Dakota: Nigerian man extradited to the US from the UK and charged with defrauding a business by stealing its checks and using those to get $348,000
- UK Action Fraud joins shipping container industry in warning about sales of nonexistent containers
- Scams impersonating friends on Instagram up 155%
- Cops allege man posed as DEA agent to get discount at Wendy’s
- Traveler tells TSA he had “no idea” a sword was concealed in his cane
- FTC gets $102 million from On Point Global, which had deceptive websites that sometimes claimed to be State DMV’s; victims can apply for refunds
- Analysis: Where is the FTC on its ability to get redress now?
- CFPB sues TransUnion credit reporting agency; alleges violation of an earlier order
- FTC sues Florida battery company over claims that they are Made in the USA even though components were imported from China
- New York: Oklahoma woman pleads guilty to PPP fraud; got $43.8 million
- Salt Lake City: Utah man charged with PPP fraud
- Texas: Woman sentenced to 70 months, nearly six years, for PPP fraud; got $1.9 million
- New York: Man pleads guilty to PPP fraud; sought $30 million
- Washington, DC: Man pleads guilty to PPP fraud; got $2.3 million; tried to get $31 million
- Phoenix: Man gets four years prison for PPP fraud; got $2.2 million
- St Louis: Man gets more than ten years prison for PPP fraud; got $2.7 million, bought Maserati and Jaguar
- Boston: Man, presumably Nigerian, sentenced to 30 months prison for BEC and romance fraud; took in $900,000
- Forbes: BEC the most costly type of fraud
- Shuts down historically black college in North Carolina
- Attack on UK Ford dealerships
- Hits Snap-On Tools; leaks company data
- Attack on Italian fashion company Zegna