BankingInsuranceSecurities.Com

A spam appearing using the name of Santander links to a fake website.

This morning's crop of overnight spam that made it through the preliminary filters arrived via a contact form relating to this very site. Ordinarily, form spams are either destroyed or reported on, partly because, even using bots, the scams that get through the anti-spam systems on the forms are a cut above the junk that comes in by mail and, often, present new - or at least new to us - threats. This one is carefully crafted, almost as if it's been revised several times to get it right. And, if it were to hit its intended target - investment businesses - it would at least cause a costly waste of time. But only time because, good as it is, it suffers from a significant flaw.

In a congressional hearing in 1987, US Congressman Norman F Lent of New York put it to the Chairman of the USA's Securities and Exchange Commission, John SR Shad that Rudolph William Louis ("Rudy") Giuliani, then the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, had a better public relations office than the SEC, it appearing that it was his office that had done all the work in the insider dealing case centred around Boesky, Milken, Levine and Drexel, Burnham, Lambert. Shad's explanation of the relationship which holds good today.

As Elon Musk, the increasingly mad genius who's not exactly loved after a court accepted his ridiculous defence in the "pedo man" case and who's the poster-boy for how not to communicate about your company in social media puts his foot so far in his own mouth he could kick a football through his.. oh, never mind. He's done it again and tanked the value of Tesla. In doing so, he's lifted his profile enough for pump and dump artists to be using his interest in the current great scam, Artificial Intelligence, and the con artists who manipulate shares are all over his "Quantum AI."

What is it with Hong Kong and its banks? The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has just announced yet another one is the victim of a passing-off campaign by internet fraudsters. It's the third this week and it's only Thursday.

And then there's this "In view of the latest situation of COVID-19, the HKMA hotline and Coin Cart services are temporarily suspended. The HKMA Information Centre is also temporarily closed to the public. Please visit the HKMA website/official Facebook page for details or latest updates:

Hotline services: HKMA website
Coin Cart services: HKMA website / official Facebook page
HKMA Information Centre: HKMA website"

A spam purporting to be for "Richard White" a customer of the Main Savings Federal Credit Union has arrived. It tells him that he has collected more than 15,000 "CURewards points". And it wants him to log into a website for one of several different options.

Société Générale Securities Australia is subject to criminal charges brought by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

SocGenSecAus? If you think that's silly, the acronym used by ASIC is worse: "SGSAPL". We'll just stick wiith "SocGen Securities".

Mark Damion Kawecki, of Frankston Victoria, Australia has appeared before the Melbourne Magistrates' Court and pleaded guilty in the first case of its kind in Australia. He fiddled the figures to help a company get on the board.

If you are a fan of Alan Greenspan, look away now. That's what he did when the first shoots of the housing bubble were evidenced - and then said he wouldn't have known anyway because the data at the US Fed was too recent. Except that it wasn't - it was simply parochial. The data was there - the Fed didn't think about it. And now, here is is again.

It's there. In plain sight. In the body of the press release from the Australian Securities and Investment Commission. It's a statement that ASIC, having been found, damned by its own words and those of the industry, wanting in its supervision of the Financial Services Landscape, is taking the gloves off. It's not going to stand for any more poor compliance. It's going to make "ongoing efforts to improve standards across the financial services industry." So this case is going to be spectacular, isn't it?

Wells Fargo & Co and its subsidiary Wells Fargo Bank, N.A, have escaped prosecution, at least for the time being, by agreeing to hand over USD3,000 million to various agencies and departments of the US Government. It all started when the company decided it needed more account holders. Normal banks advertise or put young people on the streets with flyers. Wells Fargo had a different and shorter route - it would just create accounts for people, even if they hadn't asked for them. And that's not the full extent of what the bank is paying.

The mail looks very real - but obviously isn't as this publication doesn't bank with Standard Chartered. But what arrived in one of our inboxes a few minutes ago is a very active threat.

Seriously: if there is a way to stuff up, it seems as if FinTech giant PayPal is working hard to implement it. Here's the "Virtual Agent." Remember: this is, at its heart, a tech company.

"Need more help?" says the PayPal page. Another quality control failure....

In or about 2003, I closed our publishing company's account with PayPal because they kept blocking the account. At the time, PayPal wasn't the enormous global powerhouse that it has become. It was, essentially, a bunch of nerds for whom compliance and risk management was a nuisance. When electronic money started to exercise the US government's collective mind, PayPal found that it needed some risk management processes. They didn't do it properly. Then, later, when PayPal expanded into Europe, it migrated our account to its EU operations and put money laundering, etc. risk and compliance in Dublin where they set up systems that were not only rubbish but sent out letters referring to non-existent legislation. But now, a piece of essential third party produced software is pushing us towards at least opening, even if we don't use it, a PayPal account. How hard can it be? Surely they have learned something in...

There is a long line of failures to properly plan before implementation - and of fundamental failure to understand the basics of a business or issue before launching a system.

We need to stand back, to take stock. We need to rethink our entire approach to management especially risk management. It's time to get back to basics.