Swiss crypto-friendly app forced to ramp up its anti-fraud efforts

Swiss crypto-friendly app Yuh is now asking its customers to help it fight fraud after a local regulator ordered its co-parent to strengthen anti-fraud measures.

Yuh is co-operated by state-owned lender PostFinance and Switzerland’s biggest consumer trading platform, Swissquote. Earlier this year, the latter was told by local market regulator Finma to "do more to reduce the number of reports it has to submit to the country’s money laundering reporting office," Bloomberg reported, citing CEO Marc Buerki.

While Finma put the emphasis on Yuh, Swissquote had to take action against more than 600 phishing websites this year.

Now, finance app Yuh, which also offers crypto trading, has a banner on its website's front page asking to "Help us fight fraud" and linking to a "Fraud 101" article.

“Mobile scams are real, even if it might not have happened to you yet: If a fraudster throws us some delicious-looking bait in a weak moment, we all can be lured into the trap,” it said.

The piece details how their customers should "prepare for the trap," and lists types of mobile scams and red flags one should never ignore. It also reminds users that Yuh would never do certain things that scammers do, such as asking to make a cash transfer to another account, asking to download an attachment, or asking to make a quick decision under pressure.

Similar advice has also been published on the Swissquote website.

The growing phishing threat is also highlighted in the latest report by the US-based identity and access management company Okta.

Okta’s threat intelligence team said that criminals are using v0, a generative artificial intelligence tool created by American cloud application company Vercel, to develop phishing sites that impersonate legitimate sign-in webpages, including Microsoft 365 and crypto companies.

“The use of a platform like Vercel's v0.dev allows emerging threat actors to rapidly produce high-quality, deceptive phishing pages, increasing the speed and scale of their operations,” the researchers said, adding that various public GitHub repositories offer direct clones of the v0.dev application or do-it-yourself guides for building bespoke generative tools.