Financial Scammers Use 20th Century Tools to Rip You Off

As sophisticated scams increasingly target the life savings of Americans, a more mundane effort is underway to steal from you. It’s part of a little-noticed pattern popping up all across US banking—from towers in Manhattan to hubs in Florida and even suburban Louisiana. It seems the financial industry’s lowest-paid employees keep getting caught selling sensitive customer information—your information—right out from under their boss’s noses. This kind of 20th century scamming (even fake checks are involved) is fast emerging as a critical area of weakness in bank risk controls, which is kind of ironic given the traditional (and continuing) messaging from the bank lobby. The industry has long sought to remind the public that the customers themselves (and certainly not the banks) are the ones primarily responsible for ensuring they don’t get ripped off.

BlackRock’s iShares unit offers more than 1,400 exchange-traded funds around the world, yet none of them have performed quite like this. The iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) smashed industry records in its launch this year. In just 11 months, it grew to a behemoth with more than $50 billion in assets. No ETF has ever had a better debut. One industry expert notes that its size swelled to the equivalent of the combined assets under management of more than 50 European market-focused ETFs. Nate Geraci, president of advisory firm The ETF Store, called it “the greatest launch in ETF history.” Yet IBIT’s success was about more than just racking up big numbers for BlackRock. It proved to be a turning point for Bitcoin itself.