This line-up of stories will help you discover the latest happenings around the tech world, today.
1. INTERPOL’s HAECHI IV strikes $300m in cyber fraud counter-operation
INTERPOL has concluded Operation HAECHI IV, a six-month transcontinental effort spanning 34 countries.
This operation resulted in the arrest of nearly 3,500 individuals and the seizure of assets totalling $300 million.
The operation, according to the organisation, focused on combating various cyber-enabled scams, including voice phishing, romance scams, online sextortion, investment fraud, money laundering linked to illegal online gambling, business email compromise fraud, and e-commerce fraud.
The participating nations included Argentina, Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, Cayman Islands, Ghana, Hong Kong (China), India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Liechtenstein, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Korea, Romania, Seychelles and Singapore.
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Leveraging INTERPOL’s Global Rapid Intervention of Payments (I-GRIP), the operation facilitated collaboration among countries to freeze criminal proceeds by blocking associated bank and virtual asset service provider (VASP) accounts.
Investigator collaboration led to the identification of online fraud and the blockade of 82,112 suspicious bank accounts.
The seized assets comprised $199 million in hard currency and $101 million in virtual assets.
INTERPOL’s Executive Director of Police Services, Stephen Kavanagh, underscored the operation’s significance, highlighting the $300 million seizure as a stark reminder of the escalating threat posed by transnational organized crime.
Trivia: What process describes loading information into memory before it’s needed?
A. Pretraining
B. Prefetching
C. Prebinding
D. Preempting
See Answer below
2. NCC directs Nigerian Telcos to disable unlinked SIMs by February 2024
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has directed the country’s telecommunications operators, MTN, Airtel, and Globacom, to disable all phone lines unlinked to the National Identification Numbers (NINs) by February 28, 2024.
According to NCC, subscribers who have submitted their NINs but remain unverified will also be affected by the directive.
Verification through biometrics and biodata is mandatory for all affected subscribers before their lines can be unbarred.
This directive followed NCC’s initial instruction on April 4, 2022, which required operators to impose outgoing call restrictions (one-way barring) for subscribers with unlinked NINs.
Telecom companies have however urged subscribers without linked NINs to promptly take action by visiting outlets or using digital channels before the specified deadlines.
3. UAE’s startup, Trends, secures $1m investment
The United Arab Emirates-based analytics platform, Trends, supported by LuckyDodo, has garnered a $1 million investment from a group of investors at the DIFC Innovation Hub.
Established in 2022 by Mary Queenie and Stephane Adam, Trends offers businesses comprehensive insights into market dynamics, consumer trends, and preferences.
The platform achieves this by transforming user data into valuable analytical insights.
This recent funding injection is poised to propel Trends into a phase of expansion, scale up its operations, enhance technological infrastructure, and broaden its data analytics capabilities.
Trends’ inception traces back to the virtual realm of LuckyDodo, an online platform known for its unique model where users win free prizes from various brands, which has provided Trends with a distinctive advantage.
This advantage enables Trends to tap into a rich reservoir of user interaction data, thereby transitioning from an entertainment-centric model to a data-centric one.
Trivia Answer: Prefetching
Prefetching is an optimization technique that fetches data and loads it into memory before that data is requested. When successful, prefetching improves performance and reduces latency because an application does not need to read data from a slower storage disk but can instead access it from a faster memory cache. However, it requires that the system accurately predicts what data an application or process needs in advance. Prefetching can lead to wasted resources if the system makes incorrect predictions.
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