Tag: banks

Intel Whistleblower Implicates Hillary Clinton’s Alfa Bank Hoax In Election ‘Hack’

A whistleblower report declassified last week suggests that Hillary Clinton’s campaign efforts to manufacture evidence tying Donald Trump to alleged Russian hacking in 2016 were deeper than previously known – as were Obama administration efforts to conceal them.

According to the report, a former senior U.S. intelligence analyst who investigated alleged Russian attempts to breach state voting systems during the 2016 election suspected the breaches may have been “related to activities” of the computer contractors involved in the Alfa Bank hoax, who were accused of manipulating Internet traffic data.

In that well-publicized case, a Clinton campaign lawyer worked with federal computer contractors and the FBI to create suspicions that Russia was communicating with Donald Trump through a secret server shared by Alfa Bank of Russia and Trump Tower in Manhattan.

The anonymous whistleblower – who served as the deputy national intelligence officer for cyber issues in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2015 to 2020 – told Special Counsel John Durham he stumbled onto “enigmatic” data while leading the investigation of alleged Russian cyber activity for the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian meddling in the 2016 election. He said that his discovery took place in December 2016 when President Obama ordered the ICA.

After examining state-reported breaches of election networks, the whistleblower said, “It seemed only brief interaction was occurring – in some cases, no unauthorized access, or even attempted access, was detected on ‘victim’ systems.” Though the suspicious activity initially was attributed to Russian actors, further analysis raised doubts.

But when he brought his findings to his boss, ODNI’s national intelligence officer for cyber issues, he was ordered to stop investigating and not include his findings in the final ICA draft.

“After being directed to conduct analysis of Russian-attributed cyber activity for the ICA, I had been abruptly directed to abandon further investigation,” the whistleblower analyst said.

He added that his boss, whose name was blacked out in the whistleblower statement, “directed me to abandon analysis of these events, stating reports of Russia-attributed cyber activity were ‘something else.’”

While the names of the whistleblower and his boss are blacked out in the report, a RealClearInvestigations search of federal records shows Vinh Nguyen was the national intelligence officer for cyber issues at the time. The whistleblower would have been Nguyen’s deputy.

Nguyen did not respond to RCI’s request for comment.

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Former D.C. Diplomat Charged with Sexually Abusing His Children’s Playmates

A World Bank consultant, former Australian diplomat, and father of three is being held without bond and charged with sexually abusing three of his children’s playmates who lived in his Northwest Washington, DC, neighborhood.

Thomas Mahony, 42, was arrested in July and accused of sexually abusing two 7-year-old girls and one 8-year-old boy.

“Mahony, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffed,” appeared in D.C. Superior Court Thursday where he failed to get bond as he was considered a “significant flight risk,” according to Washington Post coverage of the case.

According to the Post:

The arrest has shocked the D.C. youth swimming community, where he was known as a proud father who regularly volunteered to time races or take team photos. Two of the swim teams Mahony had volunteered with, All Star Aquatics and MVP Dolphins, sent emails to families asking them to contact police with additional information.

Court records cited by the newspaper revealed that police wanted to arrest Mahoney as far back as November 2023 when he allegedly assaulted one of the girls while she on a playdate with his children.

The U.S. attorney’s office declined to prosecute due to “consideration of the government’s burden of beyond a reasonable doubt,” according to the Post’s examination of the records.

Now prosecutors have charged Mahony with two counts of first-degree child sexual abuse and one count of second-degree child sexual abuse stemming from incidents from February 2023 to July 13, 2025.

Under D.C. law, first-degree abuse involves a sexual act while second-degree abuse involves sexual contact that can occur over or under clothing.

All three minors reportedly told authorities that they had been at Mahony’s house having fun with his children doing typical activities like “watching a movie, playing video games, or pretending to run a Target store” when the abuse occurred.

In a court filing this week, prosecutors revealed that more charges could be on the way.

The mother of two of the children told the Post she once considered Mahony “the hero of the community.” Her family first got to know him “in 2023 as the involved father and volunteer photographer at events hosted by their children’s elementary school.”

“The only thing you can do is just cry,” she said. “I feel like I failed as a mother by trusting this person.”

Prosecutors worked to keep Mahony jailed ahead of his Thursday hearing. They expressed concern that the Australian national would flee the United States, citing his relationship with the Australian Embassy. Even if he surrendered his passport, he could obtain another there, they argued.

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Trump Order Targets Political Debanking but Spares Visa, Mastercard, Payment Processor Monopolies

The White House has decided that banks shouldn’t play political bouncer, at least the banks that answer to federal regulators.

In a flourish of pen and podium, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that supposedly halts “politically motivated debanking.” That’s the practice where someone loses their bank account, not because they bounced checks or defaulted, but because someone behind a desk didn’t like their politics, religion, or choice of lawful business.

The order’s language is strong. Trump, who has a personal score to settle in this arena, told CNBC’s Squawk Box, “The banks discriminated against me very badly. They totally discriminate against – I think me, maybe even more, but they discriminate against many conservatives.”

While the press release version sounds like a broad defense of free financial access, the actual order is more of a neighborhood watch than a citywide ban. It applies only to banks, savings associations, credit unions, and other outfits directly supervised by federal banking regulators or the SBA.

That means Visa and Mastercard, the twin tollbooth operators of the global payments highway, are untouched. Same with PayPal, Stripe, and other tech-driven platforms that have spent years quietly freezing out lawful but unpopular actors with all the due process that in the real world wouldn’t even get you a parking ticket.

These companies have been the muscle in modern financial blacklisting, but they will not get so much as a warning letter under this policy.

For the institutions it does cover, the order tells regulators to rip out any guidance that allows “reputation risk” to be used as an excuse for cutting customers loose over political or religious reasons. SBA-partner banks are instructed to reinstate clients who were politically deplatformed. Federal watchdogs are told to fine, sanction, or otherwise make life difficult for any bank caught doing it again. Cases that appear to involve religion must be sent to the Attorney General for potential civil action.

It’s a tidy list of marching orders that leaves one wondering why the most aggressive financial censors, the ones that dominate online commerce, get to keep their scissors. The order takes a few swings at the branches while leaving the trunk standing.

If the point was to stop political discrimination in finance, it’s an odd choice to leave out the players who can cut you off from selling so much as a baseball card online.

President Trump has long argued that regulators wield excessive control over banks. In June, he told reporters, “The regulators control the banks” and that when an administration pushes regulators to target certain institutions, “they really control it.”

The move takes aim at a framework built during the Obama years, when the Justice Department advised regulators to treat “negative public opinion” as a legitimate risk factor. That phrase became a free pass for banks to exit relationships with any client who might attract headlines or activist campaigns. It was sold as prudence. It quickly turned into a permission slip for politically driven account closures.

The personal angle is never far from the story. First Lady Melania Trump wrote in her memoir that her own account was abruptly closed after years with the same bank. She added that Barron Trump was refused an account entirely after January 6, 2021. It was not just political activists or small-business owners on the wrong side of the ideological fence getting hit.

But while the order is a strong start, its scope makes sense only if you believe banks are the ultimate choke point. They are not. There are thousands of banks and credit unions in the United States, and if one decides to cut you off, you can usually find another willing to take your business. Even for niche or controversial industries, a determined customer can work the phones long enough to land an account somewhere. The process may be frustrating, but it is rarely terminal.

Payment processors are a different animal entirely. Visa and Mastercard are more than dominant; they are the rails on which nearly all card-based transactions run. Lose access to them, and it does not matter how many banks are technically willing to serve you; none can process your payments without going through those networks.

By leaving them outside the reach of the order, the administration has left the real monopolies in place, fully empowered to decide who gets to participate in the economy.

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The Payment Giant That Wants to Be Your Digital ID

As European authorities accelerate efforts to introduce centralized digital identity frameworks, Mastercard is working aggressively to insert itself into the core of this transformation.

The payments giant presents its involvement in the EU’s digital ID agenda as a natural extension of its expertise in secure transactions. Under the branding of “convenience” and “trust” is a much deeper issue: a private corporation with a history of controlling access to commerce is helping to shape how individuals will prove their identity across both public and private life.

Michele Centemero, Mastercard’s Executive Vice President for Services in Europe, has publicly endorsed the European Commission’s ambition to roll out the European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet to as many as 80 percent of EU citizens by 2030. “By 2030, the European Commission expects up to 80% of EU citizens could use it for everyday tasks like renting a car, signing a lease or verifying age online,” he said. “At Mastercard, we are working to support this evolution.”

According to Centemero, identity verification should feel as seamless as tapping a card. That framing serves Mastercard well, since it also helps justify why a payment processor should be involved in identity infrastructure at all.

The company’s involvement isn’t superficial. Mastercard holds a central role in two major EU-funded pilot programs: the NOBID project and the WE BUILD Consortium.

Both are focused on testing real-world scenarios where identity verification is built directly into the act of making a payment.

Mastercard’s goal is to link verified attributes such as age, student status, or residency to its transaction systems. The result is a system where every purchase can also double as a form of ID verification.

While Mastercard calls this innovation, it also has been accused of tightening its grip on how people access services. The company has already been accused of a willingness to restrict purchases or services based on opaque internal policies. Giving it a hand in identity verification extends that influence into areas that go well beyond finance.

If your access to goods or services depends not just on having the money to pay, but also on Mastercard’s approval of your identity data, the line between public service and corporate control becomes dangerously hard to find.

Online identity verification is already a source of friction for many users. Mastercard points to the fact that over 40 percent of online fraud in Europe involves identity theft and claims that its participation in digital ID development will reduce both risk and inconvenience. But the promise of greater efficiency often masks the loss of autonomy that comes with centralized, corporate-managed identity systems.

The company is also leveraging its role in shaping international standards. Mastercard is a participant in organizations like the FIDO Alliance and EMVCo and is a founding member of the OpenWallet Foundation.

These bodies influence how identity attributes are secured, shared, and verified globally. Mastercard is not only helping define the technical framework; it is working to ensure that its own infrastructure is embedded within it.

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Consumer Advocate: Dick Durbin, Roger Marshall Looking to Take Away Your Credit Card Rewards

Richard Hunt, the executive chairman of the Electronic Payments Coalition (EPC), said at a Breitbart News policy event last week that Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Roger Marshall (R-KY) are trying to take away your credit card rewards with their credit card legislation.

Hunt explained that the EPC represents a diverse group of organizations, including credit unions, community banks, large banks, and unions. He warned that two senators, Durbin and Marshall, are moving to take away credit card rewards, which many Americans use for cashback or even to pay for travel for vacation.

Marshall and Durbin have been pushing the Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA) for years. Hunt dubbed it the “Credit Card Cancellation Act,” noting that some large retailers have backed the bill.

Advocates for the bill believe that they can inject more competition into payment processing by requiring banks to work with at least one alternative payment network besides Visa and Mastercard, the dominant players in the industry.

Under the current system, if a merchant accepts credit cards, it is “locked in” to whatever payment network that credit card runs, usually Visa or Mastercard, and thus must pay whatever the fee that payment network charges for transactions.

Durbin and Marshall believe that by passing the bill, more competition among payment networks would drive down merchants’ credit card costs, and the retailers would pass on that savings to consumers. Critics of the bill contend that it would, in addition to compromising the security of payment processing, likely kill credit card reward programs, just as previous Dodd-Frank legislation eliminated debit card rewards.

Hunt told Breitbart New Economics Editor John Carney that Americans used to receive rewards on debit cards and used to get free checking accounts. However, this ended when Durbin managed to get the Durbin Amendment included in the post-2008 financial crisis financial bill known as Dodd-Frank.

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PayPal Opens Bitcoin And Crypto Payments to US Merchants

Today, PayPal announced that it will launch a new payment option allowing small US businesses to accept over 100 cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin. The option is available to any US merchant using PayPal’s online payments platform.

Merchants will pay a promotional fee of 0.99 percent per bitcoin and crypto transactions for the first year. After that, the fee will rise to 1.5 percent. Both rates are lower than the 2024 US average credit card processing fee of 1.57 percent, according to the Nilson Report.

“Businesses of all sizes face incredible pressure when growing globally, from increased costs for accepting international payments to complex integrations,” said the president and CEO of PayPal Alex Chriss. “Today, we’re removing these barriers and helping every business of every size achieve their goals.”

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In search of riches, hackers plant 4G-enabled Raspberry Pi in bank network

Hackers planted a Raspberry Pi equipped with a 4G modem in the network of an unnamed bank in an attempt to siphon money out of the financial institution’s ATM system, researchers reported Wednesday.

The researchers with security firm Group-IB said the “unprecedented tactic allowed the attackers to bypass perimeter defenses entirely.” The hackers combined the physical intrusion with remote access malware that used another novel technique to conceal itself, even from sophisticated forensic tools. The technique, known as a Linux bind mount, is used in IT administration but had never been seen used by threat actors. The trick allowed the malware to operate similarly to a rootkit, which uses advanced techniques to hide itself from the operating system it runs on.

End goal: Backdooring the ATM switching network

The Raspberry Pi was connected to the same network switch used by the bank’s ATM system, a position that effectively put it inside the bank’s internal network. The goal was to compromise the ATM switching server and use that control to manipulate the bank’s hardware security module, a tamper-resistant physical device used to store secrets such as credentials and digital signatures and run encryption and decryption functions.

The group behind the attack is tracked in the industry under the name UNC2891. The financially motivated threat group has been active since at least 2017 in targeting the infrastructures of banks. It has earned a well-deserved reputation for proficiency in its use of custom malware in attacks targeting Linux, Unix, and Oracle Solaris systems.

In 2022, Google’s Mandiant division said it had observed UNC2891 spending years inside a targeted network, during which time the intrusion went largely unnoticed. Mandiant researchers went on to identify CakeTap, a custom rootkit for Solaris systems. Among other things, CakeTap manipulated messages passing through an infected ATM switching network, most likely for use in unauthorized cash withdrawals using fraudulent bank cards. Mandiant documented two other custom pieces of malware, which the company named SlapStick and TinyShell.

Group-IB’s report on Wednesday shows that UNC2891 is still active and finding new and advanced ways to burrow into bank networks without detection.

“One of the most unusual elements of this case was the attacker’s use of physical access to install a Raspberry Pi device,” Group-IB Senior Digital Forensics and Incident Response Specialist Nam Le Phuong wrote. “This device was connected directly to the same network switch as the ATM, effectively placing it inside the bank’s internal network. The Raspberry Pi was equipped with a 4G modem, allowing remote access over mobile data.”

To maintain persistence, UNC2891 also compromised a mail server because it had constant Internet connectivity. The Raspberry Pi and the mail server backdoor would then communicate by using the bank’s monitoring server as an intermediary. The monitoring server was chosen because it had access to almost every server within the data center.

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Royal Bank of Canada closes Freedom Convoy lawyer’s accounts over ‘risk concerns’

The Royal Bank of Canada is shutting down a Freedom Convoy lawyer’s accounts over “risk concerns.”

In a July 23 post on X, Freedom Convoy layer Eva Chipiuk revealed that the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) terminated its banking relationship with her, citing “risk-related concerns” due to “recent activity” being outside their “client risk appetite.”

“As a federally regulated financial institution, RBC is required by law to comply with applicable legislation,” the letter, posted on X, read. “These laws require that we implement certain processes and procedures which directly support the formulation of RBC’s positions with respect to risk.”

“After careful consideration, we regretfully advise you that the recent activity in your accounts is outside of RBC’s client risk appetite, and consequently we are no longer in a position to continue our banking relationship with you,” it continued.

The decision followed a flagged Bitcoin transaction, after which RBC froze her account and asked her questions about her crypto activities, which she described to the Western Standard as “strange and demeaning.”

The bank gave her until August 18, 2025, to find a new financial institution, cryptically referencing compliance with federal regulations but providing no specific law or detailed explanation.

Chipiuk, who has been vocal about her criticism of Canadian institutions, suggested the debanking might be linked to her involvement in the Freedom Convoy or her public stance.

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Steam Purges Games Under Pressure from Visa and Mastercard’s Unseen Censorship

Somewhere between your mouse click and a purchase, a private boardroom full of executives quietly decided what you’re allowed to see, support, or sell. They don’t run your favorite website. They’re not elected lawmakers. But if Visa or Mastercard doesn’t like the look of a transaction, that transaction ceases to exist. That piece of content, that creator, that platform: gone.

There are a lot of complaints in tech circles about who’s getting deplatformed by YouTube this week. Meanwhile, the most consequential censorship in the digital economy has nothing to do with social media and everything to do with whether a little plastic rectangle will greenlight your purchase. And there’s no appeals process. No trial. Just a silent ax falling from a credit card duopoly that nobody elected and nobody seems able to challenge.

Take the recent purge of over 50 adult-themed games from Steam, the dominant digital PC game store. No new law had passed. It was a threat from Visa and Mastercard, quietly relayed like an old-school mafia warning. Valve, Steam’s parent company, made it clear: “We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks.”

In other words: “We’d like to keep making money.”

Valve didn’t wake up with a sudden newfound sense of moral hygiene. It was the payment processors. They pulled the fire alarm, and Steam complied like any rational hostage trying to keep the electricity on.

That’s what happens when the pipes of global commerce are guarded by a pair of unaccountable financial institutions that somehow got into the censorship business without anyone noticing.

Visa and Mastercard are no longer just companies. They’re gatekeepers of moral acceptability.

One day your art is fine, the next it’s too spicy for the algorithms; or worse, for the boardroom optics team. And if they decide your platform has crossed some invisible line? That’s it. No explanation required. No appeals offered. The economic oxygen gets cut off and there’s no recourse.

It’s one thing to be beholden to government regulations. It’s another when your business is held hostage by a pair of logos with an embossed hologram.

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Bank Branches are the Latest Creative Destruction Casualty

Over 8,000 bank branches are expected to close worldwide in 2025. Approximately 3,200 of those closures will take place in the United States. Q1 experienced 148 net branch closures in the US, with all major banks slated to close branches throughout the year.

These are merely bank closures and not bank failures, although two smaller US banks did fail this year. People simply prefer online banking as we have made the switch from relational to transactional banking.

Bankrate conducted a survey that found 77% of Americans prefer online digital banking, yet other surveys believe the figure is closer to 89%. Digital banking has been rising in popularity in recent years, up from 203 million domestic users in 2022 to the 216.8 million projected users in 2025. The survey found that 34% of consumers use online banking on a daily basis, consistently checking their account and transactions. There has even been a 19% increase in use among the 65+ crowd who is least likely to use digital services.

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