crypto fraud

A Google Tech Talk by Steve Weis that introduces modern cryptography and its use in practice and at Google. It covers proofs of security and security definitions and a special topic. HN commenters treat it as a talk on verifiable electronic voting.

Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange survey recent highlights in post-quantum cryptography at 35C3, covering the NIST competition, network protocol experiments, and broken candidates.

A UC Berkeley CS 161 lecture by Nicholas Weaver on cryptocurrency and blockchains, covering how they work and the case against them. It is aimed at a computer security course audience.

Scott Arciszewski's DEF CON 26 Crypto and Privacy Village talk critiquing the JOSE standards (JWT, JWS, JWE) and showing how to design cryptographic tokens more safely.

A Last Week Tonight segment on pig butchering scams, in which long-con romance and investment fraud is run, often by trafficked workers. It explains how victims are groomed and interviews people who lost large sums.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths examines scatter plots that were claimed to show fraudulent vote-switching in Michigan's 2020 election. He recreates the analysis and shows that the pattern arises from comparing percentages across different bases, not from fraud.

A short explainer on the history and mechanics of public key cryptography and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. It uses a mixing-paint-colors analogy to show how two parties can agree on a shared secret in public.

Dan Olson's roughly two-hour video essay critiques NFTs, cryptocurrency, and Web3, covering their technical, economic, and ideological flaws. It is heavily sourced and ends with the advice to ask whether a project needs crypto to work.

Coffeezilla gives a comprehensive history of Tether, the stablecoin issued by a company controlled by the owners of Bitfinex. He lays out accusations that it is not fully backed.

Lex Fridman interviews Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin about Ethereum, cryptocurrency and the future of money. The conversation also touches on technical topics such as quantum computing and mining.

Joe Grand recounts being hired to hack a Trezor One hardware wallet and recover $2 million of cryptocurrency. He describes three months of experimentation, voltage glitching, failures and high-stakes attempts with only one chance to get it right.

Andreas Antonopoulos argues that money has a fourth function beyond store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account, which is as a system of control. He covers the history of money and why it does not flow freely.

Christof Paar's university lecture introducing Galois fields and finite-field arithmetic as used in AES. It covers the mathematics behind the AES S-box.

Frank Abagnale, the real subject of Catch Me If You Can, speaks at Google about his life as a con man turned FBI fraud and cybersecurity expert, including advice on fraud, breaches and credit cards.

A DEF CON 23 talk showing how weak controls in electronic death registration systems let someone virtually kill a person and obtain a real death certificate, with consequences for their identity and life.

Veritasium argues that Facebook's ad revenue relies partly on fake likes, after paying to promote his page and gaining tens of thousands of followers in developing countries who never engaged. He shares his experiment and cites other cases.

Computerphile interview with Prof. Ross Anderson on how Chip and PIN payment systems are being compromised, and the attacks researchers have seen.

Coffeezilla reacts to Sam Bankman-Fried's explanation of yield farming on the Odd Lots podcast, arguing he effectively described a Ponzi scheme. The video was made well before FTX collapsed.

Linus Tech Tips tests a Chinese mining-only Nvidia card, hacked with a modified driver so it can render games and output video through an integrated GPU.

A Real World Crypto 2017 talk by a Google engineer on using private set intersection to match ad views with in-store purchases. It describes privacy-preserving matching that avoids exposing personal transactions.

Ross Scott of Accursed Farms makes a 76-minute argument that selling video games as a service is a form of consumer fraud. He lays out legal arguments that games are goods, covers ownership and programmed obsolescence, and discusses game preservation.

3Blue1Brown illustrates how enormous the 256-bit search space is, showing how infeasible it is to find a hash or key by guessing and checking.

Former bank regulator William Black explains how fraud, including liar's loans, was committed from inside banks and drove the 2008 financial crisis.

Tiffany Fong's phone interview with Sam Bankman-Fried shortly after FTX filed for bankruptcy. He discusses the alleged backdoor, FTT collateral, political donations, and his legal position.

A short clip posted on the Donald J Trump channel of Joe Biden saying his campaign built the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in history, widely taken as a gaffe for voter protection.

A short Channel NewsAsia interview clip in which MasterCard's Southeast Asia president voices distrust of cryptocurrencies produced by anonymous computers in anonymous places. It is part of the Perspectives series and runs about four minutes.

A 54-minute video by a former MrBeast worker alleging that MrBeast's operation is fraudulent, including claims that some contests are staged or manipulated.

James Mickens of Harvard gives a funny lecture at HBS's Future Assembly arguing that blockchains are a very bad idea. He covers their trust, legal and practical shortcomings for real-world problems.

BobbyBroccoli's first of three parts on Jan Hendrik Schon, the Bell Labs postdoc whose fabricated organic semiconductor results nearly won a Nobel Prize. It covers his rise and the context around Bell Labs.

Numberphile interviews cryptographer Ron Rivest about end-to-end verifiable voting. He explains how homomorphic encryption and receipts let a voter confirm their ballot was counted without being able to prove how they voted to anyone else.

Barely Sociable presents a case that Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is cryptographer Adam Back. It uses interview clips and circumstantial evidence, and also touches on the block size dispute.

At DEF CON 27, Nina Kollars tells how buying Nespresso capsules on eBay led her to investigate fraudsters reselling goods bought with stolen credit cards. She describes her non-technical tracking and reporting efforts.

WIRED has UCLA professor Amit Sahai explain zero-knowledge proofs to a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student and an expert. Each round goes deeper into the cryptography and why it matters.

hbomberguy's long video dissects the anti-vaccine movement, analyzing Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent MMR-autism study, the media's role and Wakefield's loss of his license. It combines detailed research with humor.

Brian Warner, author of magic-wormhole, presents the tool at PyCon 2016. He explains how a few secret words let two computers securely transfer files, covering the cryptography (NaCl, SPAKE2) and library use.

PBS Infinite Series explains how Shor's algorithm lets a quantum computer break RSA encryption, building on earlier episodes about cryptography and the math of quantum computers. It works through the idea step by step.

The opening lecture of MIT's Blockchain and Money course taught by Gary Gensler, covering the course plan, the history of failed digital currencies, cryptography and what a blockchain is.

BobbyBroccoli's first of two long documentaries about Hwang Woo-suk, the South Korean scientist who faked human cloning results. It tells the story of the scandal that shook a country.

Mark Rober sets up elaborate glitter-bomb traps to go after phone scammers, working his way up their chain of command, and ends with a scammer being arrested. He also points viewers to fraud-reporting resources and to scambaiter Jim Browning's investigation.

Linus Tech Tips looks at whether buying a used GPU that was previously used for crypto mining is a good idea, as miners prepare to sell off cards. The video discusses how mining affects wear on cards and what to watch for.