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Crypto Company Gemini, Named For The Winklevoss Twins, Has A Fraud Problem

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Illustration of coins passing through the pillars of the Supreme Court portico
Image: Alex Castro / The Verge

We’ve talked before about the problems in the early days of PayPal, which was then called X. Elon Musk, in his infinite wisdom, decided customer acquisition was the most important thing, and as a result, PayPal had to deal with rampant fraud. Don’t just take my word for it — here’s Peter Thiel, describing those days:

We had decided to give credit cards to absolutely anybody who wanted them. You got a up to $10,000 credit limit. Elon had told the woman who was rolling the service out that he wanted a million people to be using the new credit card by the end of the year. Fortunately, it was about two levels down from the front page, and so not that many people were able to discover this. Some people did; they wrote us back and said, “This…

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Science and Tech

PayPal’s Bringing Its Passkey Logins To Android

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Photo of someone using a phone to log into PayPal with a passkey
Image: PayPal

Android users should soon be able to log in to PayPal’s website using passkeys, the password-free login system that’s being pushed by Apple, Google, Microsoft, the FIDO alliance, and more. According to an announcement post, the feature is currently rolling out, and will be “more widely available over the coming year.”

PayPal says that the rollout will start on its website, rather than its app, and that you have to be running Chrome on Android 9 or up to access passkeys. If it’s available for your account, you may get a prompt asking if you want to create a passkey, which you can authenticate using the biometric system or passcode that you use to unlock your phone.

Passkeys are based on FIDO authentication standards, and are generally…

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US Charges Fugitive Crypto Exec Do Kwon With Eight Counts Of Fraud

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Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon

Do Kwon, the founder of Terraform Labs and creator of the collapsed stablecoin Terra, has been charged with eight counts of fraud by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, including “wire fraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, and conspiracy to defraud and engage in market manipulation,” according to The New York Times. Prosecutors have told the media that they will seek Kwon’s extradition.

The charges follow his apparent arrest in Montenegro on Thursday, which was first reported through social media posts by Montenegro Minister of the Interior Filip Adzic on Twitter (where he’s unverified, whether by Twitter Blue or legacy means), and on Facebook (where he is verified, but Facebook’s blue checks have been wrong…

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Twitter Claims ‘legacy’ Blue Checkmarks Will Start To Disappear On April Fools’ Day

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An illustration of the Twitter logo.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter has announced that it’ll start “winding down” its legacy verified program and removing “legacy verified checkmarks” starting on April 1st, and is telling users to subscribe to its Blue subscription if they want to keep their blue check.

There’s a lot to unpack here. First, the announcement isn’t necessarily a surprise. CEO Elon Musk has been promising to get rid of “legacy” blue check marks, or verification badges that were given under Twitter’s previous rules, since November, and he’s reiterated that they’d be going away “in coming months” several times. According to Musk, those verification badges were given out in a “corrupt and nonsensical” manner (though they are in fact quite useful for letting users confirm that the…

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