Fraud

A photo of the sign for the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK.

The chief executive of Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said the regulator will no longer be able to defend against every illicit-finance threat equally and must openly prioritize what it focuses on as technology-linked scams continue to rise. 

Street leading to the Chinatown in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Bokeo Province, Laos.

A new report from a U.S. think tank says industrial-scale cyber-fraud operations embedded in Southeast Asia’s special economic zones now generate an estimated $50 billion to $75 billion per year, and should be considered a hybrid security threat rather than a consumer-protection issue.

An AI-edited image of Claude on a phone being asked to commit securities fraud.

U.S. lawyers are increasingly warning clients not to treat artificial-intelligence chatbots as confidential sounding boards after a federal judge in New York ruled that a former financial-services executive could not withhold chatbot-generated materials from prosecutors in a securities-fraud case.