She had fallen victim to a SIM swap hack, where a cyber criminal had remotely gained control of her phone by impersonating her to her telco provider, Optus, and asking for an eSIM card.
Currently, most phone companies including Optus only need the customer’s full name, date of birth, phone number and address before authorising a SIM swap.
SA teacher loses her $43k life savings in ‘sophisticated’ phone scam
Known as "payment redirection", it's part of a category of scams called "business email compromise", where criminals hack an employee's email account and then, impersonating that employee, send a payment request, substituting their own bank account details.
The victims tend to be individual home buyers or small business owners, for whom the consequences of a lost deposit are devastating.
DEBASING THE CURRENCY IS AN OLD TRICK OF BAD GOVERNMENT: An Ancient Financial Crisis Has Been Discovered… in Roman Coins.
CRS In Focus – Digital Wallets and Selected Policy Issues, April 18, 2022: “Digital Wallet Landscape – A digital wallet is a software application that stores payment or account details to facilitate traditional payments that use bank and credit card details and/or cryptocurrency transactions. In addition, wallets facilitate peer-to-peer transfers, which have grown rapidly in recent years. This In Focus discusses three types of digital wallets and addresses selected policy issues..”
Members of Congress are asking the EPA to investigate the environmental impacts of crypto mining
How Democracies Spy on Their Citizens
The New yorker: “The inside story of the world’s most notorious commercial spyware and the big tech companies waging war against it.” By Ronan Farrow – April 18, 2022. “…Commercial spyware has grown into an industry estimated to be worth twelve billion dollars. It is largely unregulated and increasingly controversial. In recent years, investigations by the Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have revealed the presence of Pegasus on the phones of politicians, activists, and dissidents under repressive regimes. An analysis by Forensic Architecture, a research group at the University of London, has linked Pegasus to three hundred acts of physical violence.
It has been used to target members of Rwanda’s opposition party and journalists exposing corruption in El Salvador. In Mexico, it appeared on the phones of several people close to the reporter Javier Valdez Cárdenas, who was murdered after investigating drug cartels. Around the time that Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia approved the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a longtime critic, Pegasus was allegedly used to monitor phones belonging to Khashoggi’s associates, possibly facilitating the killing, in 2018. (Bin Salman has denied involvement, and NSO said, in a statement, “Our technology was not associated in any way with the heinous murder.”)
Further reporting through a collaboration of news outlets known as the Pegasus Project has reinforced the links between NSO Group and anti-democratic states. But there is evidence that Pegasus is being used in at least forty-five countries, and it and similar tools have been purchased by law-enforcement agencies in the United States and across Europe. Cristin Flynn Goodwin, a Microsoft executive who has led the company’s efforts to fight spyware, told me, “The big, dirty secret is that governments are buying this stuff—not just authoritarian governments but all types of governments…”
Crypto Is Poised to Reshape Taxes – and Cities Wired The state of California tried issuing its own scrip after the financial crisis. Even with it being short term and paying interest, it still barely traded and then at a >20% discount.
How Bitcoin mining devastated this New York town MIT Technology Review
Sell-off in tech stocks spreads to private start-ups Financial Times
Where’s the Truth? How the CIA Shapes the Minds of Americans Antiwar
First Air Force general to face court-martial won’t stand before a jury Task and Purpose
The Navy Is Deputizing Doctors to Enforce Drug Rules Even for Those Seeking Mental Health Help Military.com
The New York Times – To understand how risky it may be to board a flight now, start with how air circulates in a plane. “…The Risks Beyond Flights – How air flows in planes is not the only part of the safety equation, according to infectious-disease experts: The potential for exposure may be just as high, if not higher, when people are in the terminal, sitting in airport restaurants and bars or going through the security line…”
