“Now questions are swirling around dozens of EMIs regulators licensed as part of a move to boost London’s reputation as a fintech center and promote banking competition. Hundreds of regulatory, legal and corporate filings reviewed by Bloomberg sketch an unsettling picture of this new corner of the City. And they point to oversight weaknesses at the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority. Among the companies approved by the FCA, Bloomberg’s review found, are ones with executives or shareholders tied to Baltic money-laundering scandals, alleged financial wrongdoing in Russia and Kyrgyzstan, health-care fraud in the U.S. and suspected wrongdoing in Luxembourg and Australia. Dozens of firms are controlled by investors in jurisdictions far beyond the U.K., including the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates. Some openly boast of doing business with high-risk customers.”

“Santander UK is trying to recover about $175 million, or about 130 million pounds, that it accidentally paid tens of thousands of people on Christmas Day. About 75,000 people received the mistaken payments, including many customers of rival banks. Santander is seeking help from the other banks to recoup the money, the bank said in a statement. The mistaken deposits could look like normal payments to recipients because they were duplicates of regular and one-off payments that about 2,000 of the bank’s commercial and corporate customers had already paid to people including their suppliers and employees.”

“Card fraud over the next decade will cost the industry a collective $408.50 billion in losses globally, according to an annual report from the industry research firm Nilson Report . By 2030, when total payment card volume is expected to hit a whopping $79.14 trillion, the industry will lose an estimated $49.32 billion to fraud.”

“Aliaswire , a provider of digital payment and credit solutions for businesses and financial institutions, and Nacha today announced that Aliaswire will join the Phixius Peer-to-Peer Network for the exchange of payment-related data.  Established and operated by Nacha , the Phixius Peer-to-Peer Network allows participants to instantaneously exchange and verify payment-related information to enable more efficient and secure electronic payments. Peers in the Phixius network receive several important benefits, including a single source for verification and exchange of payment-related data, improved automation, revenue potential, with enhanced risk management and regulatory compliance.”

“An explosion in fraud has accompanied the public’s accelerated adoption of e-commerce over the past year, and payments companies likely will have to respond by spending more on security… For the full year, the value of losses due to e-commerce fraud will increase by 14% to more than $20 billion, according to estimates by Juniper Research. It blames insufficient fraud-mitigation efforts by merchants.”

“​Nets, a leading European payment service provider, and Ethoca , a Mastercard company, today announced a new partnership that will help merchants and banks minimize chargebacks and reduce consumer transaction confusion. It will also help reduce cases of friendly fraud, which occur when a customer claims a legitimate charge as fraud – often because they simply do not recognize it on their bank statement.”

“Forter has launched Trusted Identities to help businesses simplify online account authentication. Trusted Identities protects against account takeovers that exploit consumer credentials and prevents fraudsters from abusing systems and policies by creating multiple accounts. By reducing the impact of bad actors, businesses can shift their focus to optimizing account-specific experiences and growing revenue from their best customers.”

“Billions of dollars have been stolen from decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, a flourishing alternative financial system that replaces traditional intermediaries with software running on blockchains, according to new research by Elliptic, the global leader in cryptoasset risk management. Elliptic’s report DeFi: Regulation, Compliance and the Growth of DeCrime reveals that as of November 2021 just over $12 billion in losses have been suffered by DeFi users and investors, due to the malicious exploitation of flaws in decentralized applications (DApps) such as decentralized exchanges (DEXs), lending protocols and asset management offerings.”

“ACI Worldwide , a leading global provider of real-time payments and digital payment software solutions , today launched its proprietary Network Intelligence Technology as an integral part of ACI Fraud Management . The new technology enables banks, processors, acquirers, and networks to augment fraud prevention strategies by allowing them to securely share industry-wide fraud signals by feeding their machine learning models and leveraging their machine learning technology more effectively. It offers industry players a new, hybrid approach towards fraud prevention, combining the strength of custom, proprietary signals and complementing them with signals exchanged within the consortium of industry participants.”

“Kroger Co (KR.N) said on Friday a press release touting the acceptance of bitcoin cash at its stores this holiday season is fraudulent, making it the second major retailer in recent weeks to get entangled in a crypto hoax.”

“Bank of America today announced the launch of Account Validation, a fraud prevention service for corporate and public sector clients. Prior to initiating an electronic credit or debit payment, a client using Account Validation, can verify the status of an account and authenticate the account owner. Account Validation is supported by Early Warning Services, LLC (EWS), a fintech company that provides identity, risk and payment solutions to financial institutions. Early Warning is owned by seven U.S. financial institutions, including Bank of America.”

“The country’s super-fast payments infrastructure, relatively light policing of fraud-related crime, plus its use of the world’s most widely used language English, also made it an ideal global test bed for scams, the banks and specialists added. A British record of 754 million pounds ($1 billion)was stolen in the first six months of this year, up 30% from the same period in 2020, according to data from banking industry body UK Finance, and up more than 60% from 2017, when it began compiling the figures.”

“Globally, the average ticket for a fraudulent CNP transaction rose from $126 during 2020’s first quarter to $134 in the first quarter this year. The high-water mark for CNP fraud came during Q4 2020, when the average ticket size totaled $155, suggesting criminals became more aggressive in CNP fraud despite only 10% of transactions being fraudulent, the report says. The lower percentage of attempted fraud was due to the higher volume of overall CNP transactions during the holiday season, Vesta says.”

“INETCO BullzAI captures, decodes, correlates and analyzes each payment transaction as well as every one of the message fields  in real-time, from start to finish. Using this data, INETCO BullzAI is able to detect anomalies in a transaction using a card/customer specific machine-learning model paired with behavioral analytics. This enables real-time risk scoring for every individual customer – instantly updated every time a transaction occurs. The result is greater precision and timeliness in fraud detection and reduced false positives and false negatives. INETCO BullzAI can either replace or augment an existing payment fraud detection solution.”

“IDology , a GBG Company, today announced ExpectID Flex API, a new product that empowers businesses to verify anyone, anywhere in the customer journey, from pre-verification to post validation using unique, specially curated identity attributes and workflows. ExpectID Flex API’s advanced methodology makes it easier for businesses to utilize the platform’s portfolio of verification methods without needing to integrate with extra endpoints and scoring systems. In addition, the solution will provide full decision transparency for maximum explainability and additional fraud analysis, as well as accessing fraud intelligence from IDology’s Fraud Network.”

“Money transmitting company Payoneer reached a $1. 4 million settlement with the Office of Foreign Assets Control over 2,260 apparent sanctions violations that spanned six different sanctions programs, the U. S. Department of Treasury said Friday. Between early 2013 and early 2018, Payoneer processed transactions for parties in the Crimea region, Iran, Syria and Sudan as well as 19 payments for people on OFAC’s List of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons, known as the SDN List, the Treasury said. The transactions totaled about $802,000, the announcement said.”