A Chinese national charged over an elaborate phishing scam involving millions of fraudulent text messages had been living in Australia unlawfully and trying to avoid detection, a court has heard.
Jiahui Liu, 30, was arrested by cybercrime detectives on Tuesday after police executed a search warrant at his share house in the Townsville suburb of Aitkenvale.
The main tax havens of Europe, how are they luring the rich?
The IRS just paid 3 whistleblowers a record $74 million award—and tax evaders should be very afraid
Sydney property developer who ‘washed’ money for tax fraud scheme blackmailer forced to repay $11m
Services Australia has seen a massive surge in data breaches by scammers harvesting information from previous hacks and using it to access customer accounts, Guardian Australia can reveal.
Data obtained under freedom of information by a user, known as CR, on the transparency website Right to Know reveals that, as of 5 July, Services Australia had reported 49 data breaches as a result of social engineering – where people call an agency pretending to be someone in order to access information – in 2024.
Inaccurate comparison of benefit fraud and tax losses recirculates on social media
The world of… work enemies
TotalJobs Data Visualization: “Good working relationships can take months to build… but they can go wrong in a moment.
Sadly, it seems most of us will experience this. 62% of the 7,076 workers surveyed by Totaljobs admitted to having a work enemy According to a Totaljobs survey of over 7,000 UK workers, 6 in 10 admitted they have at least one ‘work enemy’.
For some, it’s an annoying colleague who is always getting on your nerves. But for others, it can be more serious, like an office bully causing much deeper damage. In The World of Work Spouses, Totaljobs discovered that only 2 in 10 UK workers have a close workplace friendship.
That means we’re three times more likely to develop a rift with a colleague than a bond. Boys will be (annoyed by) boys. Girls will be (annoyed by) girls. Your work enemy is likely to be the same gender as you.
Maybe familiarity breeds contempt. Or perhaps competitiveness and authority are the key factors in what make us fall out with a colleague. Either way, the relationships we have with our managers seem vulnerable to problems. We’re less likely to make enemies with someone who’s younger than us or lower on the company ladder.
Either way, we probably have to deal with them every day. If you’re reading this at work, your work enemy is quite likely to be within sight right now. 85% say the relationship started out well… then things went wrong Interestingly, almost all rifts begin with a relationship that once worked.
This suggests we know that a successful collaboration is possible. But before we can fix it, we need to figure out what went wrong…
Cognitive warfare in the West Voltaire.net
British Intel’s ‘Counter-Disinfo’ War Goes GlobalKit Klarenberg
Haitian group in Ohio files criminal charges against Trump and Vance over false pet-eating claims Associated Press
Bombshell transcripts: Trump urged use of troops to protect Capitol on Jan. 6 , but was rebuffed Just the News. Yes, this is a stone right wing site. But it quote a transcript released by a Congresscritter.
Lebanon: Memories of War New York Review of Books
Theda Skocpol (Harvard University; A..D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell), Rising Threats to U.S. Democracy — Roots and Responses
- Abstract: Why is US democracy facing an existential crisis this year? While some focus on the persona and rhetoric of Donald Trump, or stress underlying institutional distortions and polarizing social divisions, Skocpol highlights and explains the recent turn of the Republican Party and its allies toward minority authoritarian governance backed by threats and violence.
- Historical and cross-national comparisons pinpoint the most worrisome developments and necessary responses by pro-democratic forces. “Today I therefore grapple with the pressing question before us as social scientists and as citizens:
- How and why have U.S. politics and governance arrived at the present juncture where long-standing Constitutional practices and democratically responsive governance are very much at stake? My answer focuses on what I see as the prime driver of the current crisis, the recent radicalization of the Republican Party and its allies, as they have pursued two forms and phases of anti-democratic politics.
- The first version involves maximum use of legal hardball steps that stretch existing laws and rules to disadvantage partisan opponents (I also call this approach “McConnellism” in honor of its chief practitioner, outgoing GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky). The second approach targets political competitors and government operations with extralegal harassment, threats of violence, even actual violence.
- Drawing on my own research with many collaborators, as well as from many excellent studies by colleagues in political science and beyond, I will dissect the elite and popular roots of recent Republican embrace of both forms of antidemocratic politics.”
- Video of the presentation – https://www.cornell.edu/video/theda-skocpol-2024
- Full Text – https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn%3Aaaid%3Ascds%3AUS%3A1649f93f-16a7-4433-a73f-e8c2506db4d3&viewer%21megaVerb=group-discover
ATO to scrape social media, dark web for scams, tax fraud
Commonly known as OSINT, these software tools have come to prominence in the signals and intelligence community in the past few years with the increasingly large volume of information available online and the greater sophistication of software tools to capture and analyse these vast troves of information.
Notably, OSINT researchers in the UK were able to spot Russia's invasion of Ukraine before it happened due to live traffic information showing the movement of vehicles about to cross the border into Ukraine.
Now, the ATO is seeking to apply this technology in the fight against tax fraud, to catch users that might be sharing or distributing information about how to avoid paying the correct amount of tax on open and encrypted social media and the dark web.
In a request for tender published online, the ATO outlines it is in the market for a tool to "address the big data challenges facing us through an ability to detect, intercept, and respond to various and evolving threats, using integrated technology to complete advanced targeted digital data collection".
Senior Advisor at the ANU National Security College Ben Scott said more government departments were using OSINT tools to analyse publicly available data, for example Home Affairs.
"If you're trying to understand what's happening in terms of protest movements in Australia, you use what's on social media as much as possible, and that's a form of open source intelligence gathering."
The ATO lists a number of social media platforms it is hoping to scrape for information on tax fraud, including widely used platforms as well as encrypted sites such as Telegram and social media sites used by far right groups and criminals such as Gab and 8kun.
"This will provide the ATO, TPB and ACNC with an essential capability and allow us to be at the forefront of detecting, intercepting, and disrupting serious financial crime which is increasingly being exploited by criminals," the tender documents state.
The ATO sets out it has specific requirements in mind, including the ability to read large numbers of posts to find trends within the data, the ability to read images as text and to interpret how networks of users function.
Already there has been some awareness of how tax fraud can be spread online.
A viral TikTok scam saw the ATO pay out $1.6 billion in fraudulent refunds between April 2022 and June 2023. At least 150 ATO staff were investigated following the scheme's disruption.
Mr Scott said while these tools could be useful, Australia's lax data privacy laws raised concerns about the collection and use of data.
