Thursday, April 28, 2022

New York: Oklahoma woman pleads guilty to PPP fraud; got $43.8 million

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

 

  1. “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
  2. “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
  3. 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
  4. “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)
  5. “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
  6. 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
  7. “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

CBC Marketplace: Canadian TV on scams and money mules; insiders at boiler rooms in India; interview with Jim Browning (42 minutes)

Why does Canada do these great stories but not the US?
 
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


Thai police raid frees 66 from captivity in Cambodia, where they were forced to work at a Chinese-led scam call center
 
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 fraudromance fraudBEC fraudsweepstakes/lottery fraud,  tech support fraudromance fraud money mulescrooked moversgovernment impostersonline vehicle sale scamsrental fraudgift cards,  job scams,  online shopping fraud, and crypto scams

Fraud News Around the world
HumorFTC and CFPB  Virus Benefit TheftSocial mediaBusiness Email compromise fraud Ransomware  Bitcoin and cryptocurrencyJamaica and Lottery Fraud