Tag: fraud

Facebook may have known it was defrauding children and families through its online games

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Internal documents appear to show that Facebook knew it was defrauding children and families through its ecosystem of online games as early as 2011. Employees even had a name for the practice, which they dubbed “friendly fraud,” or FF for short. More damning, related documents show that Facebook employees had found a way to stop the fraud from happening, but the social media giant prioritized revenue instead.

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Unshocker as internal memo at Facebook shows that they not only knew that kids were taking advantage of their parents’ credit card details being retained by Facebook-hosted freemium games to allow them to continue to make purchases, but that they specifically instructed their developers to make it as easy as possible for people to fall into this trap. Common industry practices like requiring selected card digits for additional purchases were not implemented specifically to help ensure that kids could more-easily go wild with their parents’ bank accounts.

Taking Stock, Fraud

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Taking Stock, Fraud Article (Inc.com)

Nowadays, fraudulent online stock-trading schemes are common. But even before the first electric telegraph, two bankers committed the equivalent of modern-day Internet stock fraud.

Nowadays, fraudulent online stock-trading schemes are common. But even before the first electric telegraph, two bankers committed the equivalent of modern-day Internet stock fraud.

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Fabulous article from 1999 about how two bankers in 1837 hacked additional data into the fledgling telegraph system to surreptitiously (and illicitly) send messages to give them an edge at the stock exchange. Their innovative approach is similar to modern steganographic systems that hide information in headers, metadata, or within the encoding of invisible characters.