It is widely believed that cybercrime has already surpassed the drug trade as the single most profitable sector of illegal activities in the world.
The IMF has today published a report on how crypto assets might be used to circumvent capital flow management measures, undermining the stability of domestic economies and the global system
Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
Category Archives: Cyber Security, Quantum, Hacks, Fraud Alerts, Risks, InsurTech
BC’s Cyber Talent Shortage and What To Do About It
Techouver | | May 26, 2022
It is widely believed that cybercrime has already surpassed the drug trade as the single most profitable sector of illegal activities in the world.
In essence, cybersecurity is not something specific to IT and its hardware and infrastructure, but embedded in business, and government and their processes that rely on IT. If cybersecurity is foundational to business, government and education, and military, then it has thus become fundamental to society as a whole and therefore, of concern to everyone.
See: ISED: Cyber Security and Policy Statements
It is becoming clear to the layperson, that data breaches are affecting everyone, even those who barely use the Internet, because everyone’s personal data has been digitized by one company or another, and subsequently breached.
In recent years, there has been much written about endless cybersecurity job vacancies. More recently, more has been written about how to fill those vacancies and with more urgency.
Recommendations For Employers
1. Employers need to look internally as well as externally for people that might be able to fill their vacancies. This may require more creative internally selling, i.e., “illuminate all of the internal career paths that can end up in their cybersecurity ranks”. Employers simply can’t wait forever for external candidates. The marketplace is much too competitive.
2. Employers must now shift from buying expensive security technologies to studying the enormous amounts of cyber analytical data that few are looking at and creating an action plan for. At the least, entry level junior cybersecurity analysts need to be created, to help turn prior cyber technology investments into actionable cyber plans.
Recommendations For Government
The Canadian federal government has invested over $500 million in cybersecurity nationally, and created strategic organizations like CCCS, CCTX, Serene Risc, In-SEC-M and the National Research Council’s IRAP program. More funds have been provided since the 2021 study, in the Spring 2022 federal budget, towards improved critical infrastructure and national security.
See: Fintech Cybersecurity Best Practices
In contrast, evidence of BC’s provincial government’s action on cybersecurity has been harder to find. And the loss of prestige due to chronic underfunding or neglect in cybersecurity is exemplified by the fact that no BC postsecondary institution is included in the recently announced Cyber Security Innovation Network (CSIN), which is driven by five non-B.C. universities across Canada called the National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC).
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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UK Court recognizes NFTs as ‘private property’
CoinTelegraph | David Attlee | May 15, 2022
At the beginning of May, the British Web3 community celebrated an important legal precedent — the High Court of Justice in London, the closest analog to the United States Supreme Court, has ruled that nonfungible tokens (NFT) represent “private property.” There is a caveat, though: In the court’s ruling, this private property status does not extend to the actual underlying content that NFT represents.
The theft of Boss Beauties
In February 2022, Lavinia D. Osbourne, founder of Women in Blockchain Talks, wrote on Twitter that two digital works had been stolen from the Boss Beauties — a 10,000-NFT collection of empowered women that was created by “Gen Z change-makers” and featured at the New York Stock Exchange. The tokens came with a number of utility points, such as access to exclusive events, free books, and licensing fees. Osbourne claimed that the pieces, stolen from her MetaMask wallet, later emerged on the OpenSea market. She traced down the NFTs with the help of the security and intelligence firm Mitmark.
See: NFT Boom Will Surely Lead to Questions Over Copyright, Control and Plagiarism
The matter was brought to court in March, and on April 29, The Art Newspaper reported on the ruling of the United Kingdom’s High Court, in which the judges have recognized NFTs as property protected by law. The court issued an injunction to freeze the assets on the accounts of Ozone Networks (the host of OpenSea) and compelled OpenSea to disclose information about the two account holders in possession of the stolen NFTs. Shortly afterward, OpenSea halted the sale of these NFTs — Boss Beauties number 680 and 691.
As the identities of the wallet holders remain uncertain, the injunction was granted against “persons unknown.” In its comment on the decision, Stevenson Law firm called a freezing injunction “quite a draconian (i.e. old fashioned and harsh) remedy,” describing it as a “nuclear weapon” of law.
The token versus the asset
Racheal Muldoon, the counsel on the case, highlighted “the utmost significance” of the ruling, which, she said, “removes any uncertainty that NFTs are property in and of themselves, distinct from the thing they represent, under the law of England and Wales.” But it is exactly the aforementioned detail that made other experts skeptical of the groundbreaking importance of the court’s decision.
See: 7 Essential Ingredients of an (Open) Metaverse Framework
While the NFTs are already enjoying the status of property in their treatment by the U.S. IRS, the proclaimed difference between the token and the underlying asset does little to fill the current legislative vacuum in the U.K. and United States. “So if you have a token, you have a token. But not necessarily any rights in anything else,” as Juliet Moringiello, professor at Widener University Commonwealth Law Schoo, noted to Artnet News.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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US Treasury of Foreign Assets Control Sanctions Virtual Currency Mixer (First Time Ever)
Mayer Brown | May 13, 2022
On May 6, 2022, the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control ("OFAC") designated crypto mixer Blender.io as a Specially Designated National ("SDN"), marking the first time a virtual currency mixer has been sanctioned. The move is the latest in a series of sanctions designations and enforcement actions in the virtual currency industry based on a determination of involvement in malicious cyber attacks and laundering the stolen virtual currency proceeds of illicit ransomware attacks.
See: NASAA: Crypto scams are the leading threat to investors in 2022
The May 6 designation follows several sanctions actions in the past few weeks alone in the virtual currency sector, including:
- The April 20, 2022, designation of Russian crypto mining firm BitRiver and 10 of its subsidiaries for facilitating sanctions evasion by Russia and Russian entities
- The April 14 and April 22, 2022, designations of several Ethereum addresses as being affiliated with North Korea's Lazarus Group and involved in the $625 million Ronin bridge hack
- The April 5, 2022, designations of the world's largest darknet market, Hydra Market; virtual currency exchange Garantex; and over 100 virtual currency addresses based on their roles in enabling the transfers of ransomware proceeds and other actions deemed a threat to US national security and foreign policy interests
Virtual currency mixers such as Blender.io receive a variety of transactions and mix them together before transmitting them to their ultimate destinations. Although proponents of mixers tout their utility in increasing privacy in virtual currency transactions, enforcement officials have highlighted concerns about the exploitation of mixers to assist in sanctions evasion and laundering the proceeds of malicious cyber attacks and other criminal activity by obfuscating the original source of the virtual currency.
See: Hacker steals $625 million from Ronin blockchain NFT game Axie Infinity
In taking the actions described above, OFAC officials have acknowledged that the majority of virtual currency transactions are legitimate, while signaling the increased use of sanctions against platforms and tools that engage in facilitation of sanctions evasion or transactions involving the proceeds of malicious cyber attacks and other criminal conduct.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Onchain Blockchain Visual Analysis Tool Designed for Web3
Chainanalysis | May 18, 2022
How Storyline reinvents investigations for web3
When Chainalysis invented blockchain analysis tools in 2014, very few people understood what was happening on Bitcoin blockchain. Transaction records were difficult to interpret and it was hard to distinguish between addresses in a private wallet and an address on a custodial exchange. Reactor solved this problem by providing an easy way to visualize relationships between on-chain transactions and real world identity. Our goal with Chainalysis Storyline is to bring this same simplicity to the more complex multi-chain world of DeFi, and make it easy for our users to comprehend the blockchains of the web3 era.
See: Hong Kong’s Web3 ‘Mr. Metaverse’ vs. Mark Zuckerberg
How exactly does DeFi make cryptocurrency transactions more complicated for investigators? The core issue is chain hopping. DeFi protocols have made chain hopping easy, allowing users to switch between several different kinds of cryptocurrency in a single transaction. Cross-chain graphing in Chainalysis Reactor can mitigate much of that complexity, but tracking funds across blockchains to separate destinations can still be time-consuming.
Another issue is that many seemingly simple DeFi transactions actually involve multiple smart contracts, making them appear more complex on the blockchain than they really are. For example, below we see what a typical NFT transaction looks like in a standard blockchain explorer.
Even though at its core, this transaction represents one wallet selling an NFT to another, there are multiple other smart contracts involved, which will therefore be reflected on the blockchain: OpenSea as the NFT marketplace, the NFT collection’s smart contract, both users’ proxy contracts, and a few others. While an investigator following the NFT is likely only interested in the wallets belonging to the buyer and sellers, they would still have to parse the other entities to follow the funds.
Chainalysis Storyline solves these complexities with a new, web3-native blockchain analysis tool that provides a holistic view of the movements of all funds an address has transacted with across blockchains, but still allows investigators to concentrate on the transactions and funds that matter most to them.
See: Last year, illicit crypto addresses received all-time-high $14 billion but that was only 0.15% of total volume
With Storyline, a user constructs a new story by starting with a transaction hash. The easy-to-use interface allows you to focus on the transactions, assets and related wallets that are of most interest. With a few clicks you’ve built a timeline of the most important interactions that clearly illustrate the movement of tokens.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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IMF: Capital Flow Management Measures in the Digital Age: Challenges of Crypto Assets
IMF | LinkedIn John Ho | May 11, 2022
The IMF has today published a report on how crypto assets might be used to circumvent capital flow management measures, undermining the stability of domestic economies and the global system
Highlights:
Capital flows can bring substantial benefits for countries but also carry risks. Capital flow management measures (CFMs) can be part of the broader policy toolkit to help countries reap the benefits of capital flows while managing the associated risks.
Implementation of CFMs typically requires that financial intermediaries verify the nature of transactions & the identities of transacting parties, but it is facing the rising challenge of crypto assets.
See: IMF asks Financial Stability Board to develop a global framework for standards for regulation of crypto assets
Crypto assets have become a significant instrument for payments and speculative investments in some countries, driven by a host of macroeconomic, institutional, & demographic factors.
Crypto assets can be traded pseudonymously and held without identification of the residency of the asset holder. Many crypto service providers operate across borders, making supervision & enforcement by national authorities more difficult.
The challenges posed by the attributes of crypto assets are compounded by gaps in the legal & regulatory frameworks, as the legal status of crypto assets is often not clear and CFM laws and regulations may not cover cryptoassets.
This IMF paper aims to discuss how crypto assets could impact the effectiveness of CFMs from a structural and longer-term perspective and does not analyze how crypto assets may have been used to evade country-specific sanctions or CFMs.
See:
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Updated Report: Regulation of Cryptocurrency Around the World (Nov 2021)
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BIS Update: 2021 Survey Results on Central Bank Digital Currencies, ‘Gaining Momentum’
To preserve CFMs’ effectiveness in an environment of growing crypto-asset use, policymakers need a multifaceted strategy. Essential elements of such a strategy include:
* Clarifying the legal status of crypto assets and ensuring that CFM laws and regulations cover them.
* Developing for persons and entities engaged in crypto activities and services a comprehensive, consistent, and coordinated regulatory framework and applying it effectively to CFMs
* Establishing international collaborative arrangements for supervision of crypto assets.
* Addressing data gaps and leveraging technology (regtech and suptech) to create anomaly detection models and red-flag indicators that will allow for timely risk monitoring and CFM implementation.
See:
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Crypto Payments Report 2022: How digital currencies are revolutionizing commerce, corporates and culture
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Ottawa to review Crypto, Stablecoins and CBDCs; Budget promises more financial cops
IMF believes that a new public infrastructure of digital payment platforms could enable countries to implement these and other measures more efficiently. From the outset, these platforms can be calibrated to country-specific needs and policy objectives—and they must include appropriate risk mitigation measures.
A comprehensive legal and regulatory framework as well as its consistent implementation will likely be conducive to the emergence of law-abiding and regulatory-compliant innovations —while providing the basis and mechanisms to deal with a minority of bad-faith actors and criminals.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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CFCS Event, May 10: Modernizing Fraud Detection with NextGen Technologies
Certified Financial Crime Specialists | Apr 27, 2022
Complimentary webinar, presented by Bottomline
When: May 10, 2022 at 11:00 AM ET
Speakers:
- Ruud Grotens, Head of Fraud & Financial Crime Solution Consulting, Bottomline
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Dalit Amati, VP of Global Operations and Services, Fraud and Financial Crime, Bottomline
As payments accelerate globally, the speed needed to manage fraud prevention and detection must evolve with new payment types and frameworks.
See:
CipherTrace August 2021 Crypto Crime Report: Crypto Fraud Dips as DeFi Hacks Grow
Technology Due Diligence Process and Cyber Risks for Fintech Start-ups
How can organizations use next-gen technologies to effectively manage real-time payment fraud while satisfying customer demand for online services?
Learn how to maximize next-gen technologies with real-time, actionable alerts for fraud detection.
– Where do organizations struggle the most when it comes to cloud migration and implementing more innovative technologies?
– How are some of the more progressive banks addressing these challenges?
– How to balance fraud risk management with operational efficiency and control costs?
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Register for this free webinar --> now
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Be sure to disable iCloud back-up if using MetaMask: Apple user loses $650,000 in seconds
Finbold | | Apr 19, 2022
Important: Be sure to follow details on disabling iCloud backup if using MetaMask!
In one of the most recent hacking incidents, an attacker managed to steal a person’s entire collection of cryptocurrencies and NFTs worth more than $650,000, from their MetaMask crypto wallet, as reported by CNET on April 18. A few days before, the victim, Domenic Iavocone, took to Twitter to convey what exactly happened:
This is how it happened, Got a phone call from apple, literally from apple (on my caller Id) Called it back because I suspected fraud and it was an apple number. So I believed them They asked for a code that was sent to my phone and 2 seconds later my entire MetaMask was wiped
See: Crypto.com $34 million stolen in user account hack | Data Breach Lessons
According to Iavocone, the stolen assets included $160,000 worth of Ethereum (ETH), a Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT worth an estimated $80,000, as well as $100,000 in ApeCoin (APE) and $250,000 in Tether (USDT).
According to a security expert called Serpent, “it’s going to happen to a lot more people” and the key to avoiding such unfortunate events is to:
“Always use a cold wallet to store your valuables. Never give out verification codes to anyone. Protect your information, don’t give out your phone number or your personal email. Caller information is easy to spoof. Companies like Apple will never call you.”
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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