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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.

Arthur Yuen, Deputy Chief Executive, Hong Kong Monetary Authority, today set out Hong Kong's stall. Is today's statement an indication of success or a note being of not-quite competitive?

The extraordinary case of an elderly man who was forced into expensive legal proceedings to recover almost GBP200,000 accidentally paid into the wrong bank account could have been so easily avoided if UK banks operated, under the auspices of regulators, a simple cross-check of information. It happens elsewhere.

Washington 5 December 2019 – Today the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) took action against Evil Corp, the Russia-based cybercriminal organization responsible for the development and distribution of the Dridex malware.

The trouble with looking for transactions ‘consistent’ with ‘known’ patterns ‘indicative’ of child exploitation payments to countries with ‘known’ risks is that countless legitimate payments exhibit similar features, says Dr Ron Pol of AML Assurance and La Trobe University.