By Brian Jackson @ Adobe Stock
At the Institute for Political Economy, Paul Craig Roberts explains the sophisticated scams hitting some banks in the United States. He writes:
Prosecutions across US reveal sales via social media, dark web Industry has fended off legislation that could boost liability
US retirees sitting atop a record stockpile of wealth are facing an onslaught of elder fraud, with estimated annual losses exceeding $28 billion.Photographer: Mlesna/E+
The new staffer was supposed to help Toronto-Dominion Bank spot money laundering from an outpost in New York.
She instead used her access to bank data to distribute customer details to a criminal network on Telegram, according to prosecutors in Manhattan. Local detectives who searched her phone allegedly found images of 255 checks belonging to customers, along with other personal information on almost 70 others.
It’s part of a little-noticed pattern popping up across US banking — from towers in Manhattan, to hubs in Florida and even suburban Louisiana.
As sophisticated scams targeting the life savings of Americans create headlines across the US, the industry’s lowest-paid employees keep getting caught selling sensitive customer information out the back door — emerging as a critical area of weakness in banks’ risk controls.
That’s an inconvenient trend as firms steadfastly argue to policymakers and the public that customers bear primary responsibility for ensuring they don’t get conned out of their savings. While many scams seemingly target people at random, some victims have said con artists who tricked them knew a lot about their finances at the outset.
“The more employees there are inside a company with access to sensitive customer information, the higher the risk that access is going to be abused,” said R.J. Cross, a privacy advocate at US Public Interest Research Group. “Companies need to have technical measures in place to ensure employees and contractors can’t run off with people’s information or access data that isn’t necessary for their job duties.”
Read more here.
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