Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen a bunch of writing about what seems to be fake COVID-19 testing sites. They take your name and info, and do a nose swab, but you never get test results. Speculation centered around data harvesting, but that didn’t make sense because it was far too labor intensive for … Read More “Are Fake COVID Testing Sites Harvesting Data?” »
Category: fraud
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The City of Austin is warning about QR codes stuck to parking meters that take people to fraudulent payment sites. Powered by WPeMatico
The FBI has issued a bulletin describing a bitcoin variant of a wire fraud scam: As the agency describes it, the scammer will contact their victim and somehow convince them that they need to send money, either with promises of love, further riches, or by impersonating an actual institution like a bank or utility company. … Read More “Wire Fraud Scam Upgraded with Bitcoin” »
The Squid Game cryptocurrency was a complete scam: The SQUID cryptocurrency peaked at a price of $2,861 before plummeting to $0 around 5:40 a.m. ET., according to the website CoinMarketCap. This kind of theft, commonly called a “rug pull” by crypto investors, happens when the creators of the crypto quickly cash out their coins for … Read More “Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Game Cryptocurrency Was a Scam” »
It turns out that it’s surprisingly easy to create a fake Harvard student and get a harvard.edu email account. Scammers are using that prestigious domain name to shill brands: Basically, it appears that anyone with $300 to spare can – or could, depending on whether Harvard successfully shuts down the practice — advertise nearly anything … Read More “Using Fake Student Accounts to Shill Brands” »
Here’s a story of someone who, with three compatriots, rented textbooks from Amazon and then sold them instead of returning them. They used gift cards and prepaid credit cards to buy the books, so there was no available balance when Amazon tried to charge them the buyout price for non-returned books. They also used various … Read More “Textbook Rental Scam” »
In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court just narrowed the scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: In a ruling delivered today, the court sided with Van Buren and overturned his 18-month conviction. In a 37-page opinion written and delivered by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court explained that the “exceeds authorized access” language … Read More “The Supreme Court Narrowed the CFAA” »
I just co-authored a paper on the legal risks of doing machine learning research, given the current state of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: Abstract: Adversarial Machine Learning is booming with ML researchers increasingly targeting commercial ML systems such as those used in Facebook, Tesla, Microsoft, IBM, Google to demonstrate vulnerabilities. In this paper, … Read More “Adversarial Machine Learning and the CFAA” »
Really interesting research: “An examination of the cryptocurrency pump and dump ecosystem“: Abstract: The surge of interest in cryptocurrencies has been accompanied by a proliferation of fraud. This paper examines pump and dump schemes. The recent explosion of nearly 2,000 cryptocurrencies in an unregulated environment has expanded the scope for abuse. We quantify the scope … Read More “Cryptocurrency Pump and Dump Scams” »
A federal court has ruled that violating a website’s terms of service is not “hacking” under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The plaintiffs wanted to investigate possible racial discrimination in online job markets by creating accounts for fake employers and job seekers. Leading job sites have terms of service prohibiting users from supplying fake … Read More “Clarifying the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act” »