Legal issues and news

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.

Six Clovers, a digital payments company founded by two former PayPal developers, designed its Rapid platform to enable fast cross-border transactions using cryptocurrencies backed by government-issued money.

The data analytics provider has deployed cloud hosting to scour international payments for signs of fraud and money laundering.

Financial institutions spent nearly $214 billion last year — an 18% jump from 2019 — to meet regulatory requirements for fighting financial crimes, a new study says. The spending included more staffing to manage risks posed by customer growth.

Prosecutors say Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards leaked over 50,000 documents, including 2,000 suspicious activity reports, related to payments involving former President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign chairman.

Scams in which a real person’s information is used to create fictitious businesses or individuals have led to $6 billion in credit losses. The Federal Reserve has developed a standard definition for synthetic identity fraud so lenders can distinguish it from traditional identity theft.

Bank of America was ordered by a judge to change its practices after thousands of unemployed California customers receiving public benefits complained that when their prepaid debit cards were hacked, the bank made matters worse by treating them like criminals.

The card network is connecting its Enhanced Authorization system with products from Accertify, Microsoft and Riskified, providing Amex with more data at the time of the transaction.

A New York court ordered the freezing of $560 million in assets held by entities controlled by Renren CEO Joseph Chen, Softbank Group and others, an amount pegged to a stake in the personal finance startup Social Finance, which is slated for a blank-check merger this week.

The companies are working to thwart abuse on the Honey platform, a deal-finding system that PayPal acquired in 2019.

As both e-commerce and payment fraud accelerate, Sift is strengthening its digital protection platform by acquiring Chargeback, a real-time dispute management provider.

Cryptojacking is a particularly dangerous attack, but there are ways to fight back, Marc Laliberte of WatchGuard writes.

The digital migration caused new risks, and new responsibilities for security professionals.