Many fraud fighters are descending on San Francisco this week to attend the TrustCon conference.

Word on the street is that Generative Ai will be the hot topic and how it’s changing the trust and safety world.

It will be interesting to see what the big companies think the future looks like.

Some of the more interesting developments last week;

• Lexis CEO says stimulus fraud was $1 Trillion

• UK says 61% of APP fraud originates on Meta

• A Major Revolut Fraud Refund Glitch Was Revealed

• A new Facebook deep fake ad is freaking people out

• A new USPS phishing scam designed to fool anyone

• Experimental Ai can hear your password as you type

• Hong Kong Police find an easy remedy to deep fake scams

• ID Theft victims from the EIDL programs are getting bills

Let’s get to the top stories of the week!

AI Can Steal Your PINs And Passwords By Listening To Your Finger Taps

AI is listening to you very carefully. And according to these researchers, it can be used to hear your PIN numbers and Passwords that you are entering on the keyboard.

The software can be launched as malware or malicious apps that a user downloads to their device, and then it can send the data to the bad actor.

The AI is used to recover the key taps on the screen and then correlates them with the keystrokes it has been trained on based on the tablet or phone. While the AI is experimental, it could correctly infer what the users were typing in.

Special thanks to Dennis Weiss of IPQS for alerting me to this development.

Thank You, Zuckerberg - Majority of Push Payment Fraud Starts On Meta Platforms

The UK is turning up the heat on Zuckerberg and his Meta Platform. According to the Financial Times, 61% of all Authorized Push Payment fraud originates on his platforms costing victims about £300 million a year.

No single bank in the UK has that much market share. The largest - Lloyds, has about 24% of the market. That means that Meta should be doing much more than they are now.

Still no word from Zuckerberg or Meta on the claim or any rush to step in and volunteer.

Well - they might have to soon because the government is stepping up their efforts to hold them accountable.

Click on this link or image below to read the article

Watch This Jaw-Dropping Deep Fake Ad That Is Circulating on Facebook

This deep fake advertisement is so convincing that it might drop your jaw. Certainly, money expert Martin Lewis is concerned that many people in the UK might fall for it since it is so close to reality.

The scam, circulating on Facebook, is believed to be the first deep fake ad of its kind.

Click on this link or the image below to watch the video

Hong Kong Police Tell People To Do This One Thing To Stop AI-Deep Fake Scams

Police in Hong Kong are warning people about an uptick in deep fake AI video scams.

The videos are being created with as little as a single picture and a few seconds of video recordings from executives, celebrities, and acquaintances they know.

To stop a deep fake video fraudster in their tracks, Tyler Chan Chi-wing, a cybersecurity expert, instructed people to ask the person to move their finger across their face. If it is a deepfake, the video will glitch and make the imitated face blur.

Hong Kong police are expecting these deep fake videos to become the next trend, so they are giving citizens easy tools to help them foil the scammers.

Major Scam Progress - 9 UK Banks Sign Up With MasterCard on Scams

Now this is major progress in the fight against scams. For 5 years, Mastercard has been working with UK banks to follow illicit funds as they flow through mule accounts.

Now, in partnership with 9 UK Banks, including Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, NatWest, Monzo, and TSB, Mastercard is helping identify real-time payment scams before funds leave a victim’s account.

Based upon early results with TSB, Mastercard expects it could prevent about £100 million in hard dollars from victims accounts this next year.

Read the release by clicking on this link or image below

Revolut Gets Caught In Major Fraud Refund Glitch Loses 67% of Profits in 2021

By all accounts, it is a first-party fraud disaster that cost Revolut close to 67% of its profits in 2021.

In 2021, Cybercriminals were encouraging people to make large, expensive purchases on their Revolut accounts, knowing full well they would get declined.

But that was the whole point. Those fraudsters knew that Revolut had a big hole in their refund policy in the US. Revolut would refund the money to the customer’s account when the transaction was declined, and the account holders could withdraw the money through ATM machines.

The fraud was only revealed after their US bank partner noticed that they were millions of dollars short in their account.

Apparently Revolut had to inject many millions into the partners accounts to make up for the $23 million in fraud that was perpetrated.

The whole scheme was never disclosed publicly but given it would have played a major role in lost profits, I imagine this is a very big deal!

Click this link or image below to read the article

This Malicious USPS Ad on Google Could Fool Almost Anyone

A Google Sponsored Ad might seem like the United States Postal Service posted it, but when users click on it, it will take them to a phishing site in Ukraine.

When users search for the term USPS Tracking, the first link that appears in the search results is a malicious ad. After they click the advertisement, they will be asked to enter the delivery address. A message will appear that

This is the ad here.

Once you click on the ad, you are directed to a site in the Ukraine which progressively gets to you enter your credit card information to receive more information on your package.

Another Bold $1 Trillion Fraud Claim by Lexis Nexis CEO

Haywood Talcove, CEO of Lexis Nexis, made the news two weeks ago when he claimed the government would likely lose about $1 trillion dollars to Ai assisted fraud. 

This week, he is featured in a new article by the Wall Street Journal and advised that the government likely lost $1 Trillion dollars during COVID due to stimulus fraud.

That would mean about 52% of all stimulus money went to fraudsters.

His estimate is $600 billion higher than what ID.me had estimated in 2022.

At the time, The House Committee on Oversight and Reform claimed that ID.me had inflated the stimulus fraud losses to push their identity product.

The truth is whether it was $400 billion or $1 trillion, the losses were unacceptable and never should have happened in the first place.

Click this link or the image below to read the article

Those Fraudulent Identity Theft EIDL Loans Are Hitting Borrowers Credit Reports

It’s been 3 years since those first EIDL loans were granted to small businesses identity theft victims are just starting to feel the pain.

You see many of those loans are starting to come due now. For years, many victims have been in the dark because the loans were not due for 30 Months after the disbursement and now those loans are starting to go into default.

And well, now is about the time those victims are getting nasty notices from the SBA.

One Reddit user posted their experience, claiming that “someone took out a COVID-era loan (EIDL loan) of $58,000 in my name almost 3 years ago. How did I learn about this? Because I recently received a letter in the mail saying a payment was due in February 2023, and this was about to be sent to collections if I didn't pay immediately”

We can expect to see identity theft statistics start to uptick now that millions of victims find out they were ensnared in COVID-era fraud.

Whew.. it can be hard to keep up with all these trends. Things are moving so fast in fraud.

Well, thanks for catching up with me this week.

Have a terrific and positive fraud-fighting week!

FrankonFraud