Fraud Financial News

Mastercard has launched a new artificial intelligence (AI)-power tool which is aimed at helping banks fight payment fraud and scams in real-time prior to any monetary exploits.

Calgary police are warning the public about a cryptocurrency scam that involves scammers who are posing as officers.

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban has again locked horns with former securities chief John Reed Stark, this time over who was ultimately to blame for FTX’s collapse and the impact on creditors.

Asset manager Fidelity is expected to file with the U.S. securities regulator for a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund, joining other big money managers seeking to launch bitcoin ETFs, the Block reported on Tuesday citing a source familiar with the matter. In the past two weeks, BlackRock, WisdomTree, Invesco, VanEck, and Bitwise have filed new applications with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for spot bitcoin ETFs, sending the price of bitcoin to a more than one-year high of over $31,000 on June 23. Fidelity declined to comment. The Boston-based financial firm is also part of a consortium that includes market makers Citadel Securities and Virtu Financial, retail broker Charles Schwab, and venture capital firms Paradigm and Sequoia Capital, which recently launched a crypto exchange called EDX Markets.

On June 28th, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced that Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York had issued a default judgment that granted a permanent injunction against Michael Ackerman, a resident of Alliance, Ohio. 

FTX has recovered about $7 billion in liquid assets so far, and the search for additional assets is continuing, CEO John Ray said in the FTX Debtors’ second interim report, released June 26. The extensive commingling of funds complicates their efforts, however.

Web3 and other blockchain-powered markets are still in their infancy, with most of the underlying technologies, economic models and coding architectures still being improved, tested and updated. While this is normal for an emerging market and technology, there are always loopholes that bad actors can exploit and target to attack their victims. In particular, with social engineering tactics, scammers manipulate users’ emotions and create a sense of trust and urgency.

FTX has filed a lawsuit in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware against some of the investment firms it had ties to before its collapse. The suit, filed June 22, contained 16 counts and seeks over $700 million from the defendants.

Terraform Labs, and one of his aides to four months in prison on charges of using fake passports. Kwon, 32, who was behind cryptocurrencies that suffered a multi-billion dollar crash last year, and his chief financial officer, identified only by his surname Han, were arrested at Podgorica Airport on March 23 after attempting to travel to Dubai with forged passports, reports Yonhap News Agency. The Basic Court in Podgorica announced on its website, it handed four-month prison terms to both. They denied the charges during previous hearings. Earlier this month, the court granted bail to both on the condition that they each pay 400,000 euros ($428,241) in bail money and are placed in confinement under police surveillance.

Canadian citizens are being advised to double-check crypto trading service providers as they may be using “fictitious” regulatory bodies to boost their credibility.

Blockchain investigator ZachXBT has been sued for libel by one of the people he accused of fraud, according to a June 16 social media post. According to the post, Jeffrey Huang, known as “MachiBigBrother” on Twitter, has accused ZachXBT of damaging his reputation through false allegations.

Attorneys for former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (also known as “SBF”) are seeking to sever or dismiss six charges from his upcoming trial, claiming that it may take years for courts in The Bahamas to rule on whether they will allow him to be tried for these offenses, according to a June 12 document filed in a New York federal court.

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In a June 8 speech at the Piper Sandler Global Exchange & Fintech Conference, United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler compared the current crypto market to the 1920s U.S. stock market, saying that it is full of “hucksters,” “fraudsters,” and “Ponzi schemes.” Just as Congress cleaned up the stock market by enacting securities laws, the current SEC can also clean up the crypto market by applying these laws, he argued.

Reginald Fowler, a former NFL team owner, has been sentenced to six years of prison for operating as a “shadow bank” to the crypto sector, which involved over $700 million in unregulated transactions over a 10 month timespan in 2018.

Police in Kazakhstan say they have shut down a suspected fraudulent crypto trading platform, with its alleged mastermind arrested.

Centralized crypto exchange Gate.io denied rumors of illiquidity on May 31, stating that “there are no issues with our operations or withdrawals as rumored.” The statement comes after numerous Twitter channels had alleged that the exchange was experiencing insolvency due to an alleged connection between it and the cross-chain router protocol Multichain (MULTI).

Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is seeking to subpoena documents from Fenwick & West. That’s the law firm that served as the outside counsel to FTX, Alameda Research and SBF personally from “early in their development” until the FTX bankruptcy. Now SBF’s legal team wants to use the documents in his defense in the 13-count criminal case against him.

United States prosecutors will drop some of the charges against former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried if the Bahamas government objects to them, according to a document filed on May 29 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

FTX’s leadership is looking to claw back more than $240 million from insiders and executives that benefited from FTX's "wildly inflated" acquisition of stock-clearing platform Embed in September.

Cryptocurrency trading platform Coin Cafe has been ordered to repay $4.3 million to its users after allegedly charging “exorbitant and undisclosed fees" for storing Bitcoin on the platform — leading to some accounts being drained entirely of its funds.