Thursday, October 27, 2022

Fusion Fraud Taskforce: Fraudsters have stolen an unprecedented amount of U.S. COVID-19 relief funds

For too long successive Liberal Governments sat on their hands while the worst kind of crooks stole money from the Scheme and Australians with disability, contributing to greater NDIS costs


Fusion Fraud Taskforce: Government to crack down on NDIS provider fraud amid warning scheme will soon cost $50bn annually



Criminal use of crypto an ‘emerging threat’ — Australian police 

Law enforcement will need to “continually evolve” in order to keep pace with criminals, Australia’s federal police said.


Australia’s federal law enforcement agency has highlighted the criminal use of cryptocurrency as an “emerging threat” in the country but says it’s a continuous challenge to keep up the pace with criminals. 

A spokesperson for the Australian Federal Police (AFP) told Cointelegraph that there has been an “increase in the number of offenders using cryptocurrencies to facilitate illicit business and attempting to conceal the ownership of assets,” noting: 

“The criminal use of cryptocurrency is an emerging threat for law enforcement.”

However, they admitted the biggest challenge for law enforcement is to “continually evolve” their “tools, techniques and legal frameworks” to keep pace with criminals, particularly as mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency increases.


Cybersecurity fast becoming the main game across the APS


Fraudsters have stolen an unprecedented amount of U.S. COVID-19 relief funds — possibly more than the GDPs of many world economies. But millions of dollars had already been streaming from government programs long before the pandemic, and those cases hold valuable lessons. Here’s how to stanch the flow of money from vulnerable agencies.

Fraud in federal programs is getting bigger, more complex and more ambitious than ever. Although the unprecedented public spending in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic — and the similarly unprecedented amount of taxpayer dollars lost to fraud — have drawn more attention to this problem in recent years, the government’s fraud woes long predate the pandemic. Consider the complex fraud case of Eugene Sickle, the former deputy executive director of the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute, a South African research institute focusing on sexual and reproductive health and vaccine-preventable diseases. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was the institute’s primary source of funding, and Sickle administered U.S. grant funds for its projects.

Stanch the flow

Anatomy of fraud in government programs


Warning signs now too big for NSW mobile speed camera cars, Transport for NSW tells budget estimates


It's time to bring Frank and Fearless back to the APS


Brennan Center – Who Protects Your Vote?: “The “inde­pend­ent state legis­lature theory” is a misread­ing of the Consti­tu­tion, advanced in recent years by a small group of right-wing advoc­ates, that would give state legis­latures wide author­ity to gerrymander elect­oral maps and pass voter suppres­sion laws. It has even been used as polit­ical cover to try to over­turn elec­tions


 Securing the U.S. Electricity Grid from Cyberattacks GAO Blog: “Reliable electricity is essential to the conveniences of modern life and vital to our nation’s economy and security. But the electricity grid is an attractive target for cyberattacks from U.S. adversaries—such as nations like China and Russia, as well as individual bad actors, such as insiders and criminals. So, how is the electricity grid vulnerable and what could happen if it were attacked? For National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (October), today’s WatchBlog post looks at two of our recentreports on cybersecurity risks to the U.S. electric grid and federal efforts to address them…”




Medibank says all customers' personal data compromised by cyber attack


Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review And Roundup: Elkins Reviews Raskolnikov's Should Only The Richest Pay More?


  1. “The new study shows for the first time that the burgeoning brain of a newborn rat will accept human neurons and allow them to mature, while also integrating them into local circuits capable of driving the rat’s behavior” — the science and ethics of transplanting human brain organoids into animals
  2. “Everything about grad school was a surprise to me… it was the first time in my life that I felt truly out of my league, and I worked hard until I felt I could be the best at it” — Justin Caouette (Bridgewater State) is interviewed about his life, education, and work
  3. Animal consciousness — a discussion with Jonathan Birch (LSE), Rachael Brown (ANU), Dan Burston (Tulane), and Liz Irvine (Cardiff)
  4. “Relaxation, then, will bring out the worst in foolish people, but in the wise it will bring out the best” — Plato and Philo on whether the wise person will get drunk
  5. “Why don’t we have the right to end our lives not just when we want to but to also do so in style?” — Daniel Callcut on designer deaths
  6. “If ugly people are told repeatedly that they are not ugly or that their woes are not due to them being ugly, even though they are, then this social taboo of being ugly and telling someone they might be ugly, are what puts those people at a hermeneutic disadvantage of interpreting the social world and their place in it” — Thomas J. Spiegel (Potsdam) on the epistemic injustice of lookism
  7. There was a competition for criticisms of effective altruism, with $120,000 in prizes — here are the winning entries (via MR)


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