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Researchers Demo Hack Against African Micro-Finance Accounts
mask.of.sanity writes "Security researchers have shown how to raid Africa micro-finance bank accounts en masse using fake audio one time passwords. The banks use audio one-time passwords to authenticate users logging into their accounts, but failed to implement properly security controls across numerous systems. Crucially, the researchers did not reveal how they cracked the encryption in order to protect users."
I think this is on a slightly different use of the term "microfinance", though there's overlap. The books you link are about microcredit specifically, a hyped-up approach to poverty reduction based on very small loans spread throughout a community, which Grameen Bank made famous. But the kind of microfinance this article talks about is more about regular banking: accounts and transactions, usually via a mobile phone. It's become popular in Africa because of the lack of traditional financial networks, and the increasing ubiquity of mobile phones as the main link into modern systems.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
yep, it's the same as the "mother teresa" scam, in which the PR is such that everyone thinks that this "saint" is helping out the poor, but the reality is that the poverty is being continued and no actual help is being given out, and the dontations taken in are used to perpetuate and strengthen the infrastructure of the so-called "charity organization".
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Wait a minute, that's the same type of scam pulled by the Red Cross and the United Way: they all come out of the woodwork during disasters and ask for a lot of donations and money (because they can skim off the top [heavily skim] of money, but not of actual goods) which can be put towards expensive cherry desks and mahogany paneling and half-a-million-dollars-per-year executive salaries.
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Sadly, the business and MBA types find every possible way that people like to part with their money (whether it's for food you need, or toys you want or lust after, or donations you gladly give to help others or assuage their own consciences) and insert themselves into the equation to take the majority of the money as "overhead costs" for running the schemes themselves.