Falling On Card Times
March 8, 2022
The Good News
- Flashmob orchestra in Trafalgar Square plays in solidarity with Ukraine (Guardian)
- You can order free COVID tests from the government again (NPR)
“Money has never made man happy, nor will it, there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more of it one has the more one wants.” – Benjamin Franklin
A Money Thing Happened On The Way To The Bank
Every farmer knows having a fox guarding the henhouse is a bad idea. But that’s exactly what banks are doing when it comes to the popular money transfer app Zelle. The digital payments network is owned by Early Warning Services, LLC, a private financial services company owned by seven of America’s largest banks, including Bank of America, Capital One, and Wells Fargo. The app launched in 2017; it’s free, fast, and convenient, and is now the country’s most widely used money transfer service. Last year, people sent $490 billion through Zelle, dwarfing the $230 billion sent through its closest rival, Venmo.
It’s also a favorite of criminals. Other types of bank transfers or transactions involving payment cards typically take at least a day to clear. But once crooks scare or trick a victim into handing over money via Zelle, they can siphon away thousands of dollars in seconds. There’s no way for customers – and many times the banks themselves – to retrieve the money. Almost 18 million Americans were defrauded through scams involving digital wallets and person-to-person payment apps in 2020.
Justin Faunce was a longtime Wells Fargo customer who lost $500 in January to a scammer impersonating a bank official. Faunce immediately reported it, but Wells Fargo said the transaction wasn’t fraudulent because Faunce had authorized it. The bank’s customer service representative even told him lots of people were “getting scammed on Zelle this way,” and he was lucky to have lost only $500 because “many people were getting hit for thousands of dollars.” Federal law covering electronic transfers only requires banks to cover “unauthorized” transactions.
Another victim, Bruce Barth, had been a Bank of America customer for 30 years. In late 2020, Barth was hospitalized with Covid-19 and his phone disappeared from his hospital room. The thief got access to his digital wallet and ran up credit card charges, took out cash from an ATM, and used Zelle to make three transfers totaling $2,500. The bank refunded his cash and credit card losses, but denied his claims for the Zelle transfers because they were validated by authorization codes sent to a phone previously used for that account – even though the phone had been stolen. Barth was livid. “It’s like the banks have colluded with the sleazebags on the street to be able to steal.” (NYT, $)
Georgia On My Mind
- In 2008, Vladimir Putin ordered the military invasion of another Eastern European country, Georgia. Hundreds of Georgians were killed, almost 200,000 displaced, and Russians still occupy South Ossetia and Abkhazia today. Now that Putin has orchestrated a horrific invasion of Ukraine, Georgia fears he might not stop there.
- In a surprising about-face last Thursday, Georgia’s government formally applied for EU membership, just two days after declaring it wouldn’t accelerate its application process due to start in 2024. Moldova also made its own formal request for EU membership. Both came one day after Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy made his own impassioned request for fast-track membership in the bloc.
- Georgia’s prime minister had said previously his government would not join international calls for sanctions against Russia. Since then, every night, tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets of the capital, Tbilisi, to show solidarity with Ukraine and to call for the PM’s resignation. (Guardian)
Falling On Card Times
- Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. announced on Saturday that they were joining other businesses in suspending operations in Russia over the invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s Central Bank said Sunday that those credit cards issued by Russian banks using the Visa and Mastercard payment systems will stop functioning overseas after Wednesday.
- The bank added that many Russian banks planned to issue cards using China’s UnionPay system instead, said to be enabled in 180 countries. Hundreds of Russian tourists are stranded in Bulgaria’s mountain resorts and cannot return home as the EU has closed its airspace to all Russian planes, and the Central Bank urged those tourists to withdraw cash before the ban goes into effect. (Reuters)
Additional World News
- Germany to spend $220 billion for industrial transformation by 2026 (Reuters)
- Suspected migrant boat carrying 300 people runs aground in the Florida Keys (CNN)
- Libya oil production falls after 2 crucial fields shut down (ABC)
- Is Covid Over? No, But Global Health Funders Are Moving On (Politico)
- In South Korea, the ‘Squid Game Election’ campaign gets ugly (NPR)
- Russia’s war on Ukraine is dire for global hunger. But there are solutions (NPR)
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Mind The Map
- On Monday, the Supreme Court refused requests from Republicans in North Carolina and Pennsylvania to block new congressional maps approved by courts in those states, meaning the fall elections will be held in districts more favorable to Democrats than the ones created by the GOP-led legislatures.
- North Carolina’s Republican leaders had asked the Court to embrace an unprecedented theory that the state’s judiciary could not impose a new map for congressional elections, even though a court found the legislature’s version had violated the state’s guarantee of free and fair elections. In the Pennsylvania case, the Democratic governor had vetoed a map passed by the GOP-controlled legislature.
- The state supreme court decided to impose a map, and Republican voters and candidates had asked SCOTUS to put a hold on the state supreme court’s decision. In a 5-4 decision in February, SCOTUS declined to throw out an Alabama congressional map that created only one district with a majority of Black voters despite three federal judges determining the map violated the Voting Rights Act. (WaPo, $)
Sun And Done
- Now that solar has gone from an emerging technology to one that’s more mainstream, solar advocates are squaring off against conservationists. On one side, fans of solar energy are pushing a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels, with massive solar projects popping up across the U.S. On the other, conservationists and people who live near the solar projects are watching in horror as green fields are filled with rows of silicon solar panels, damaging ecologically sensitive areas.
- The battles have played out state by state and county by county, forcing communities to consider just how much they’re willing to sacrifice to decarbonize the economy. They’ve also triggered a hunt for new and unexpected locations to put millions more solar panels. Researchers, environmentalists and energy companies are increasingly turning to places like agricultural canals, grazing pastures, the roofs and the parking lots of big-box retail stores, the land next to interstate highways and airports, and the tops of landfills, mines, and wastewater treatment plants. (NBC)
Additional USA News
- Cuomo Re-emerges and Blames ‘Cancel Culture’ for His Fall (NYT, $)
- Weight Watchers allegedly used diet app to illegally gather data on children, FTC says (Guardian)
- Conservative think tank’s exclusive gathering will include Biden official — but not Trump (CBS)
- Trump muses about illegally bombing Russia using Chinese flags (WaPo, $)
- Progressives prep big spending for Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation (Axios)
- Armed intruder at Joint Base Andrews is arrested; another fled the base (WaPo, $)
A McLawsuit
- For years, McDonald’s has struggled to keep its soft-serve ice cream machines functioning. Without them, people can’t get a milkshake, soft cone, or most importantly, a McFlurry. Late-night TV comics joked about the problem. Rivals Jack in the Box and Wendy’s roasted McDonald’s for it on social media. An online tracker called McBroken monitors McDonald’s ice cream machine outages across cities.
- McDonald’s franchisees complained the devices are overly complicated and their breakdowns are hard to fix. In 2019, two accountants founded a firm called Kytch Inc. to resolve the issues. Kytch began offering a device to mount on the machines that sent out real-time texts and emails to alert owners about a breakdown and prevent damage to the machines. The company said that by 2020, McDonald’s owners in 30 states were using Kytch’s breakdown-spotter. But then McDonald’s began telling franchisees the devices weren’t sanctioned and could potentially pose a safety hazard. McDonald’s said the machine’s makers, a company called Taylor, had exclusive rights to repair them, and furthermore, McDonald’s was developing its own smart device for the shake machines.
- That led to a McFlurry of lawsuits, with Kytch accusing Taylor of running a multimillion-dollar repair racket and conspiring with a McDonald’s franchisee to replicate Kytch’s technology. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission even got involved last summer, writing McDonald’s franchisees seeking information on what, exactly, is going on with the broken ice cream machine problem. Last week, Kytch sued McDonald’s for $900 million in a Delaware federal court for allegedly disparaging it through false advertisement. Kytch claims that although it had won an endorsement from the National Restaurant Association, McDonald’s and Taylor ran false advertisements claiming the Kytch Solution was unsafe. The campaign to discredit the small company was so successful it wound up destroying it. “McDonald’s unlawful conduct had dire financial consequences for Kytch, its founders, investors, and its employees,” the suit alleged. McDonald’s is denying the allegations. (The Hill)
Additional Reads
- Massive Hawaii taro root could be largest ever harvested (AP)
- World’s Largest Cruise Ship Sets Sail on First Voyage (Insider)
- Reasons to be cheerful: optimists live longer, says study (Guardian)
- How War in Ukraine Drives Up Inflation at US Farms, Supermarkets, Retailers (WSJ, $)
- Researchers uncover how the human brain separates, stores, and retrieves memories (NIH)
- How to save the International Space Station and prevent the dreaded “gap” (Ars Technica)