Legal issues and news

The company angered hundreds of customers when its software flagged their accounts as suspicious and suddenly cut them off, according to a ProPublica report. The episode illustrates the challenge shared by fintechs and banks of rooting out scammers without being overzealous.

Fraudsters use different tactics based on their intended victims, and banks like Republic Bancorp and Wells Fargo are targeting the kinds of notices they send — and which channels they direct them to — in response.

Stephen Calk, a Chicago banker, pushed through $16 million in sketchy loans to Donald Trump's onetime campaign manager because he "wanted a powerful government title," Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexandra Rothman said in her opening statement in Calk's criminal bribery trial.

The cloud-based software vendor has completed a $10 million funding round through BlackFin Capital Partners and Picus Capital.

Policymakers need to stop attacking credit bureaus and take action against credit repair firms that use dubious tactics to wipe bad debt from consumers' credit reports. Such schemes both impair banks' ability to accurately underwrite loans and further hurt real victims of identity theft.

A 2017 investigation into the fake-accounts scandal — conducted by the board of directors with a major assist from the law firm Shearman & Sterling — was billed as independent and objective. Was it?

A slew of websites operated by financial institutions, governments and airlines including Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing and Australia’s central bank went down briefly Thursday in the second global internet outage in two weeks.

The Biden administration wants financial institutions to tell the government more about their customers to help the IRS thwart wealthy tax evaders. But critics say the plan could threaten account data security and the privacy of even low-income consumers.

Before its disappearance, Avaddon said it hacked Valley National Bank's network and threatened to leak sensitive data. The bank is still investigating.

Financial firms can minimize the damage by understanding where key threats lie, educating employees and customers about phishing scams, and breaking down silos between compliance, fraud and security teams.