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Zelle, the Banks’ Answer to Venmo, Proves Vulnerable to Fraud

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Zelle, the Banks’ Answer to Venmo, Proves Vulnerable to Fraud

Big banks are making it easy to zap money to your friends. Maybe too easy.
Zelle, a service that allows bank customers to instantly send money to their acquaintances, is booming. Thousands of new users sign up every day. Some $75 billion zoomed through Zelle’s network last year. That’s more than twice the amount of money that customers transferred with Venmo, a rival money-transfer app.
But the same features that make Zelle so useful for customers, its speed and ubiquity, have made it irresistible to thieves. Hackers and con artists have used the system to steal from victims — some of whom had never used Zelle or even heard of it until someone used it to clean out their bank accounts.
Interviews with more than two dozen customers who had their money stolen through Zelle illustrate the weaknesses that criminals are using in targeting the network. While all financial systems are susceptible to fraud, aspects of Zelle’s design..

Tariff Dodgers Stand to Profit Off U.S.-China Trade Dispute

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Tariff Dodgers Stand to Profit Off U.S.-China Trade Dispute SHANGHAI — Want to avoid American tariffs? In China, a company called Settle Logistics says it knows a way.
Specifically, that way goes through Malaysia — a 4,600-mile diversion compared with sending a shipping container from China straight across the Pacific to the United States. But when those Chinese products arrive at an American port, they will look as if they had come from Malaysia, according to the company, and will be spared tariffs aimed at Chinese goods.
“For those unfair trade barriers targeting our industries from certain countries,” Settle Logistics says on its website, “we can adopt other approaches to bypass those trade tariffs in order to expand markets.”
Such zigzagging routes are called transshipments, and President Trump has used them to justify the trade fight he has picked with a number of countries. They could also take on new relevance should the United States and China carry out their threats to levy a ..

Business leaders who want to succeed need to embrace their human side

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Sometimes company bosses need to scrap the expensive advice
One of the questions I’m often forced to ponder in the course of my work is why some companies succeed and others do not.
I don’t mean financially, although that helps, but in the reputational sense. They appear to have an easy rapport with the public, with their shareholders, with the business media, with politicians and with regulators. When things sometimes go wrong, as they inevitably do, they can easily be forgiven. For others, by contrast, an error is widely regarded as another negative, sometimes fatally so.
For the first group, they can turn even the very worst into good, not cynically and exploitatively, but naturally. For the latter, it may prove to be the final blow, for the senior management or the brand, or both – the executives destined never to recover their personal reputations.
Read more London falls out of top 10 most expensive business travel destinations What’s the most traumatic event to befall an o..

AT&T and Verizon under investigation over possible collusion to stop people switching phone provider

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The Department of Justice is investigating potential efforts by AT&T and Verizon to hamstring a technology that could make it easier for consumers to seamlessly switch their wireless carriers, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The probe appears to focus on whether those companies – perhaps in a bid to stop their subscribers from jumping ship to rivals – colluded to undermine so-called eSIM cards, a technology that could someday allow the owners of smartphones, smart watches or other devices to change their service provider on their own, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak freely about the probe, which has not been made public.
If the US government ultimately determines that AT&T and Verizon harmed competitors or consumers, it could result in major fines or other penalties.
Verizon Executive Vice President, Hans Vestberg, speaks during a keynote discussion on 5G and mobile innovation during CES 2018 in Las Vegas in January (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/G..