Deepfake technology, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), is reportedly becoming a favored tool for criminals engaged in imposter scams, posing a significant threat to individuals and the banking industry. This surge in cybertheft and financial scams has prompted regulators, law enforcement agencies and financial institutions to take urgent action to protect consumers, Bloomberg reported Tuesday (Aug. 22). The advent of deepfake technology has given rise to more sophisticated and damaging fraud schemes, according to the report. By using AI to create computer-generated voices that are ..read more

Blackbird.AI, a narrative and risk intelligence firm driven by artificial intelligence (AI), has secured $20 million in Series B funding to ramp up its sales and marketing efforts, extend its offering to more customers and raise awareness around disinformation in key industries. In a press release announcing the raise on Thursday (June 15), the company said publicly traded companies, for example, lose about $39 billion annually due to disinformation-related stock market losses, while $78 billion is lost globally each year. Wasim Khaled, CEO and co-founder at Blackbird.AI, highlighted ..read more

Phishing, account takeovers (ATOs) and other types of fraud are endemic in the retail industry, especially as more merchants migrate online during the pandemic, and fraudsters now have more resources than ever with which to conduct their attacks. A study found that there are more than 15 billion consumer credentials circulating on the dark web, deposited there by massive data breaches that have spilled untold terabytes of consumers’ personal data into cyberspace. Merchants therefore face a battle on two fronts: stopping hackers from spilling their customers’ personal data onto the open market ..read more

A great description of the criminal craze in credential stuffing is found in PYMNTS' May 2021 edition of the Digital Fraud Tracker®, done in collaboration with and supported by PayPal. Jason Ordway, chief technology officer of Slice, the pizza-ordering app integrated with 15,000 U.S. pizzerias, put it like this: “You've got bad actors that download [or] write scripts that take a [stolen] login and password and test a million of them [at once].” It’s a vivid, accurate depiction. Among others, Ordway is forthcoming about threats emerging from the Dark Web, with various known or new attack vector ..read more

Goldman Sachs Global Head of Commodities Research Jeff Currie told CNBC the bitcoin market is maturing. “I think in any nascent market you get that volatility and those risks that are associated with it,” he said, according to CNBC, following a sharp tumble on Monday (Jan. 11), when it fell below $31,000, just days after breaching $41,000. Currie also noted that stability will come from increased institutional investment. Right now, only about 1 percent of the $600 billion invested in bitcoin is institutional, he said, CNBC reported. “The key to creating some type of stability in the market is ..read more

Criminals seeking to exploit unmet demand for the COVID-19 vaccine are selling doses – many presumably fake – on the "dark web," the portion of the internet dominated by merchants who operate beyond easy reach of law enforcement agencies, the Financial Times reported on Friday (Dec. 18). The newspaper cited examples of vendors selling vaccines produced in Western countries and in China, ranging in price from $250 to $750. The paper said that prior to the approval of vaccines by regulators in the United States and the European Union, authorities had warned that fraudsters would use the opportun ..read more

Hundreds of thousands of Instacart customers are having their personal data sold on the dark web, including the last four digits of their credit cards, and the data could include people who used the popular delivery app as recently as this week, according to a BuzzFeed News report. There were sellers offering data from what could have been 278,531 accounts, although some may have been duplicates or fake, the report noted. Instacart said that had never happened. “We are not aware of any data breach at this time,” an Instacart spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “We take data protection and privacy ..read more

The digital age, of course, has given rise to digital scams. And now the fraudsters, increasingly, seem to be eyeing bitcoin, the marquee name in cryptocurrency, as coin of the realm across the dark web. Earlier this week, Crystal Blockchain Analytics released a report that showed the value of bitcoins transferred across the dark web was up by 65 percent in the first quarter of the year to about $384 million. It should be noted that the value of the activity rose, due in part for the price per bitcoin advancing through the period (thus the total number of transactions decreased). Along the way ..read more

Bitcoin prices, trading and shopping are down but criminal activity involving the cryptocurrency is at an all-time high, the New York Times (NYT) reported on Tuesday (Jan. 28). Drug sales on the dark web are particularly high, up 60 percent and hitting $601 million from January to March 2019, according to blockchain analysis firm and government advisor Chainalysis. Bitcoin has also been pivotal in the rise in ransomware cyberattacks. Illegal activity comprises 1 percent of all Bitcoin transactions, but that is almost double from 2018. Chainalysis’s new Crypto Crime Report indicates that crimin ..read more

In the day-to-day life of the regular law-abiding internet user, the dark web is mostly a scary unknown. Insofar as the average consumer knows, that side of the web – which is accessible only via a TOR server – is the place where their personal information is sold whenever there is a data breach. A slightly more knowledgeable consumer might also know that the dark web is where one goes to buy illegal things with bitcoin. And there is something to those particular stereotypes, since credit card numbers, passwords and Social Security numbers are all available for sale on the dark web. And, in th ..read more