Zelle, a favorite tool for online criminals, *might* begin protecting users from scams soon. Victims who report they’ve been “robbed” by thieves on the service have long been denied dispute rights we take for granted with other kinds of electronic transactions. On Monday, banks leaked a plan to the Wall [Keep reading]
Elon Musk has taken over Twitter and .. well, a lot is going on. One really important development that might be overlooked in the noise and chaos since the acquisition is Musk’s new – and now delayed – attempt to change Twitter’s Blue Check system. Verification online is a very, [Keep reading]
“Do your own research” sounds like a harmless — unassailable? — suggestion. It’s more complicated than that, says today’s guest, UNC professor Francesa Tripodi, author of the new book The Propagandists’ Playbook. In this episode of Debugger in 10, Tripodi discusses the IKEA Effect in research, why Googling is more [Keep reading]
UPDATE: DEC. 19, 2022 — @RustyDogFriendly is back online. Basically, I just kept trying. It seems from the outside as if Meta/Facebook have hired more people to handle these requests and that’s why this account finally got the human attention it needed to be fixed. But I don’t know, perhaps [Keep reading]
Should a company executive face criminal charges after a data breach? That’s one of the questions opened up by the remarkable trial recently of Joe Sullivan, former head of cyber security at Uber, who was recently convicted of essentially hiding a hack from federal investigators. The case has people in [Keep reading]
For decades, American workers and employers had dabbled with the idea of telecommuting — working from home — but only a tiny fraction of workplaces really allowed it. Then the pandemic hit. The world was plunged into a real-time experiment in remote work, and despite an awful lot of ups [Keep reading]
We finally have some numbers on how much fraud is happening at Zelle. Four large banks — Truist, PNC, US Bank, and Bank of America — tell Congressional investigators that consumers report about one-quarter of a billion dollars in fraud and scams on Zelle annually. That doesn’t include data from [Keep reading]
In the digital age, crime is often all about economies of scale. Many of the tools we’ve built make things very easy for criminals. It’s cheap to send millions of emails, so spam is a problem. You probably knew that. But you might not know how cheap it is to [Keep reading]
From this week’s inbox: “My wife was a victim of a Bank of America and Zelle scam, we lost $6,800 and the bank told me that there’s nothing they can do. Is this true? It blows my mind that our money is gone just like that. Is there really nothing [Keep reading]
In a crime so ugly it’s hard to believe it’s real, billion-dollar corporations have turned their algorithmic ray guns on elderly and vulnerable Americans — specifically to help criminals deliver convincing lottery spam and other scams. And they did it for years. I’ve covered this topic before, but this week [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan