TEK2day

Operating at the Intersection of Technology and the Capital Markets

    Tag: fraud

    • The Social Media-Enabled Pump and Dump

      Hopefully prospective SEC Chairman Gary Gensler will work to rein in the frothy activity that has occurred in the capital markets over the past decade. These range from slap on the wrist fines (large banks in particular), which amount to nothing more than a Cost of Goods Sold charge, to SPACs to more recently social…

    • Elon Musk Is A Carnival Barker At Best, A Criminal At Worst

      The retail trading crowd views Elon Musk as a populist hero. The reality is Musk is a carnival barker and borderline fraudster in the vein of WeWork founder Adam Neumann. Mr. Musk got off easy under lax former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton. Recall in August 2018 when Musk posted on Twitter that he had secured…

    • A “FinTech” Approach To Election Technology

      If state election commissions and state legislatures would have adopted voting technology platforms that mimic the Trade Order Management/ Execution Management financial technology systems available on the market today, much of the drama around the 2020 General Election could have been avoided. Many electronic voting systems lack full auditability and therefore leave themselves exposed to…

    • Square’s Cash App Has A Fraud Problem

      We compared a number of Fintech apps in the Google Play Store. Square’s Cash App ranked #7 (See our analysis for Fintech rankings). Venmo failed to rank in the top 600. Recent Cash App user reviews from the same Google Play Store analysis suggest Cash App is frequently hacked. View our analysis by clicking the…

    • Fraud – A Sign of The Times

      Fraud always spikes during frothy markets. If it feels like we are beating you over the head as it relates to Quality CEOs and CEO Integrity it is because we are. High Quality, High Integrity CEOs are the best preventive measure against getting burned by fraudulent companies. 2020 has delivered massive equity market valuation froth…

    • Institutional Investors Forgot They Have A Voice. PLUS – Big Tech Regulation.

      It is amazing what institutional investors – especially large holders – put up with. Do Portfolio Managers communicate with CEOs any longer? PMs used to speak with management teams to provide feedback around capital allocation decisions, financial disclosures and more. My sense is that less of this interaction occurs today. Below we cover a few…

    • There Is No Substitute For In-Person Due Diligence

      This week Wirecard announced that EUR 1.9 billion of cash is missing. A trip to the company’s profit center would have spared investors from suffering a major headache and major losses. The Financial Times put forth a detailed case about Wirecard’s red flag-waving accounting practices in its October 2019 article: “Wirecard’s suspect accounting practices revealed,”…

    • F for Fake

      F for Fake. No, not the 1973 Orson Welles movie by the same name, but rather deepfakes – one of the scarier AI derivative technologies. Samsung’s “Few-Shot Adversarial Learning” models could render a video of you from a single profile photo. Researchers at Samsung’s Moscow-based AI research center have developed a “deep convolutional network” capable…

    • Authentication in A Digital Age

      A conversation with Jonathan Maietta and Jeff Conroy – Chief Scientist at Authentix: