FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and the Modern Political Machine (and His Arrest)

 

Michael P. Senger, attorney and author of the book “Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World,” had a lot to say about FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried over on his substack newsletter, The New Normal. At first sight, he says, the collapse of Bankman-Fried’s fraudulent cryptocurrency empire seems quite straightforward: FTX owes billions in debt but doesn’t actually own a single penny of its claimed assets. However, if you pay closer attention to the details, says Senger, you’ll notice several instances of how Bankman-Fried played a vital role in curating our modern political machine.

 

Senger notes that after FTX went bankrupt, the NYT and Washington Post both ran articles that portrayed the young CEO as a sympathetic, more-or-less honest businessman with a big heart who suddenly got very deeply unlucky. Yet from the beginning, claims Senger, Bankman-Fried had been dishonest. Not only did he never own the assets he claimed to have had, but he also admitted in a Vox interview that his many philanthropic efforts were also entirely for show.

 

In Senger’s analysis, Bankman-Fried was playing both sides all along — with fraudulent money. FTX poured millions of dollars into pandemic prevention, as well as into initiatives to detect emerging viral threats and strengthen public health systems. Yet very tellingly, Bankman-Fried simultaneously contributed millions of dollars to cover the COVID “lab leak” theory.

 

The author concludes that FTX’s example shows us the true face of the current political machine. Its CEO used stolen money to donate to causes that would boost his image in the public eye. When billionaires support policies like the ones that were enacted during the pandemic, we are told that they do so for the greater good. But Senger argues that the pandemic policies never helped the world. Instead, he says, they created an economic catastrophe, set human rights back several decades, and destroyed America’s global credibility.

UPDATE: Just before publishing, news came out Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas on Monday.

Read: https://michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/sam-bankman-fried-and-the-pandemic

Also read about the arrest: https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/12/13/the-miserable-end-of-sbf-and-what-comes-next/

 

Senate Committee adds age verification requirements to Bill C-11

Bill C-11’s Senate committee has adopted an amendment adding age verification to online undertakings under the Broadcasting Act. Proposed by Senator Julie Miville-Duchêne, the amendment comes as a policy objective, so it will be up to the CRTC to decide how to implement it. The new piece of legislation states that “(r.1) online undertakings shall implement methods such as age-verification methods to prevent children from accessing programs on the Internet that are devoted to depicting, for a sexual purpose, explicit sexual activity;”

 

According to Michael Geist, an Ottawa law professor, the policy would greatly impact children since all online services that transmit or retransmit programs would have to establish age verification procedures to prevent explicit sexual content from being viewed. “If the CRTC implements it, the policy will surely be challenged as unconstitutional,” says Geist.

 

Government officials argued against the amendment, but it passed 7-5 with two abstentions. The CRTC’s implementation of the policy may require age verification for Twitter and Google, which both enable access to this type of content. In Geist’s opinion, the age verification process would raise many concerns, including privacy concerns posed by collecting the age data of millions of Canadians

 

“This is a stunning addition to Bill C-11 that would easily extend to commonly used sites and services. If this survives further approvals, it may not survive a constitutional challenge.”

 

Read: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2022/12/from-bad-to-worse-senate-committee-adds-age-verification-requirement-for-online-undertakings-to-bill-c-11/

 

Iran-Backed Hackers Targets Human Rights Groups, Journalists And Politicians

 

Hackers backed by the Iranian government have been targeting Middle Eastern activists, journalists, diplomats, and politicians through social engineering and credential phishing campaigns.

 

The espionage campaign was attributed by Human Rights Watch to APT42, a hacking group funded by Iran and first discovered by cybersecurity firm Mandiant in September. They claimed that APT42 supports Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps intelligence gathering efforts and has conducted over 30 confirmed operations against nonprofit, education, and government targets worldwide since 2015.

 

APT42’s most recent espionage attempt was discovered when a Human Rights Watch employee received suspicious WhatsApp messages from a fictitious Lebanon think tank employee. The advocacy group discovered a link in the message that directed the recipient to a bogus login page that captured their email address and multi-factor authentication code.

 

There were three people whose accounts were known to be compromised by the attackers, a reporter for a major U.S. newspaper, a woman’s rights activist from the Gulf region, and a refugee advocacy consultant based in Lebanon whose emails, cloud storage drives, contacts, and calendars were accessed.

 

Human Rights Watch’s analysis, conducted alongside Amnesty International’s Security Lab, found 18 additional victims in the same campaign.

 

Human Rights Watch has urged Google to beef up its Gmail account security warnings after discovering “inadequacies” in Google’s security measures. Because Google’s account activity security warnings do not send or display any permanent notification in a user’s inbox or send a push message to their phone’s Gmail app, phishing victims were unaware their Gmail accounts had been compromised.

 

Read: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/06/iran-hackers-espionage-campaign-journalists-activists/

 

Fintech Company Neener Analytics and the Future of Credit

 

Credit scoring techniques in the modern world are fixated on a user’s credit history but do not consider an individual’s willingness to repay their loan. This leaves a vast untapped market of individuals with no credit history. In fact, the current system leaves almost 88% of the global population “invisible” and unable to access any loans at all.

 

Strangely, even high net-worth individuals can have poor credit scores because they go long periods of time without borrowing anything and because their income, though large, is often irregular. Clearly, the global economy needs to develop a new, well-balanced system that gets money to those who will use it productively without hurting lenders.

 

Neener Analytics, founded in 2017 by Jeff LoCastro and Dr. Marc Tomlinson, looks at a user’s language to correlate a precise combination of the user’s words with their perceived financial risk. Neener Analytics asks not “can you pay?” but “will you pay?” The company is focused on small individual data over large population demographics and uses a “1-click” permission formula to scan a user’s social media for data.

 

For those who do not have social media or do not want to grant access to private user data, Neener offers an Automated Risk Decisioning Assistant (ARIA) chat box which can evaluate a user’s risk profile in less than 20 conversational exchanges. The ARIA code has been set up to mimic the human brain with a neural-type network. As far as analyzing your social media goes, ARIA is different from other software in that it does not only analyze what you talk about online but how you talk about it.

 

Each person communicates in their own unique way, and Neener wants to create a unique communication fingerprint per applicant. This then allows Neener to create a personalized matrix that tells lenders if a person will pay, is high or low risk, and can even detect when an applicant is providing false information to mitigate fraud.

 

As it stands, Neener Analytics says it can help lenders disburse 26% more loans without increasing lenders’ current risk. Indeed, AI-backed fintech companies like Neener Analytics play a major role in removing structural barriers to global credit accessibility.

 

Read: https://www.infosys.com/iki/perspectives/automated-risk-decision-making.html

 

Scotland Yard Shuts Down iSpoof Website in UK’s Biggest Fraud Investigation

 

Police have arrested over a hundred individuals in London alone as part of investigations into the UK’s largest fraud operation. The “iSpoof” website used in operation has been described by the Met as a “one-stop spoofing shop” used by scammers to steal British money via fake bank phone calls. It has been estimated that nearly 200,000 people have fallen victim to these calls.

 

Set up in December 2020, iSpoof helped scammers disguise their phone numbers as calls from credible organizations like the bank or tax office, with scammers paying for services via bitcoin. Over 10m fraudulent phone calls were made via iSpoof, with 3.5 million of those calls happening in the UK alone. The scammers tricked people into giving them money or access to their bank accounts over these calls, successfully stealing about £10k per person and nearly £50m overall.

 

The Met began investigations into the matter in June 2021, and poof was finally taken down in November with help from the US, Netherlands, and Ukraine. Among the 100 individuals arrested in London was the mastermind behind the service himself, Mr. Teejai Fletcher. Fletcher, 34, of East London, was charged with making or supplying articles to be used in fraud, participating in activities of an organized crime group, and proceeds of crime matters on November 7th. He was due to appear in court on December 6th.

 

Head of the cybercrime unit for the Met, Det Supt Helen Rance, said: “Our message to criminals who have used this website is (that) we have your details and are working hard to locate you, regardless of where you are.”

 

Police have a list of victims’ phone numbers and will be reaching out to them via text by 25th November. Any messages received after this date, they warn, are not from the police. The text will ask potential victims to check the Met’s website and provide details of their experience and will not contain any clickable links. Anyone who suspects that they, too, have fallen victim to fraud but did not receive this text is highly encouraged to make a report with Action Fraud.

 

The Proceeds of Crime Act will be used to recoup victims’ money where possible.

 

Read: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/nov/24/100-people-arrested-ispoof-uk-biggest-investigation

 

 

 

Elsewhere Online

 

TikTok is now prohibited on government devices in Texas and Maryland as well as three other states

https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/tiktok-banned-on-govt-devices-will-private-sector-follow-suit

 

There has been a data breach at the popular HR and payroll company Sequoia

https://www.wired.com/story/sequoia-hr-data-breach/

 

State representative from Texas proposes banning social media for minors

https://spectrumnews1.com/oh/dayton/news/2022/12/09/texas-representative-files-bill-to-ban-social-media-for-those-under-18

 

A growing number of attacks are leveraging open-source repositories in the software supply chain

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/supply-chain-attacks-growing/

 

New Drokbk malware uses GitHub as a dead drop resolver

https://thehackernews.com/2022/12/researchers-uncover-new-drokbk-malware.html