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Online EducationABA Banking Journal: ABA’s Benda shares policy recommendations for fighting AI-enabled scamsJuly 29, 2026
Artificial intelligence isn’t replacing scams, but industrializing them, American Bankers Association EVP for Risk, Fraud and Cybersecurity Paul Benda told senators today. Benda testified before the Senate Special Committee on Aging during a hearing on the growing threat of AI-enabled scams. He explained how generative AI has made scams more convincing, personalized and scalable while enabling criminals to exploit trusted identities and communications channels. He also shared several policy recommendations for mitigating the problem. “A criminal can now create a convincing voice, video, photograph, text message, advertisement, or online persona with little technical skill and at very low cost,” Benda said in prepared remarks. Benda shared how banks use AI, advanced analytics, employee training, consumer education and information sharing to better identify suspicious activity and protect consumers from increasingly sophisticated fraud schemes. As for policy recommendations, Benda called for establishing a National Office for Scam and Fraud Prevention, strengthening telecommunications safeguards, improving fraud-related information sharing, enacting the SCAM Act and modernizing identity and authentication systems. “Congress can help by establishing accountable national leadership, strengthening telecommunications safeguards, improving information sharing and funds recovery, supporting modern identity systems, and ensuring that every sector involved in the scam lifecycle is responsible for protecting the public,” Benda said. Back to TopABA, associations: Stablecoin review committee must establish formal proceduresJuly 29, 2026
The Genius Act allows payment stablecoin issuers to choose to be regulated by state-level regimes as long as those regimes are substantially similar to federal regulation. To review state-level regulations, the bill established the Stablecoin Certification Review Committee, which is comprised of the Treasury Secretary and the heads of the federal banking agencies. The SCRC will also determine whether foreign issuers can operate in the U.S., and whether companies “not predominantly engaged” in financial activities may issue stablecoins. In a letter to regulators, ABA and the other associations recommended the SCRC adopt procedural rules governing all of its determinations before it acts and set out what those rules should require. For example, they recommended the committee establish a rule to formally consult with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and National Credit Union Administration before making decisions. “Weak or opaque procedures risk inconsistent determinations, an inadequate administrative record, and — most consequentially for the banking industry — a payment stablecoin issuer held to a lower effective standard than the one applied to banks under direct federal supervision,” they said. “Strong, durable procedures guard against each of these outcomes.” Back to TopABA Banking Journal: Nichols: Bankers seeking surgical changes to Clarity Act to protect local lendingJuly 29, 2026
The roughly 100-page report noted that the Federal Trade Commission received more than three million fraud reports from consumers in 2025, with reported losses of $15.9 billion. The losses represented a 28% increase from the prior year and a 1,800% increase since 1997, when the agency began tracking fraud and scam statistics. Modern scams increasingly originate through social media platforms, online advertising, telecommunications networks, email and messaging services, with financial institutions often seeing only the final payment, according to the report. The authors concluded that combating scams requires coordinated action across every stage of the scam lifecycle rather than focusing solely on the payment transaction. “The threat posed by fraud and scams impacts entities beyond a single industry or jurisdiction — it is a national challenge that requires an all-of-ecosystem approach,” the report said. ABA: Report has correct focusThe committee report “rightly highlights the critical roles that technology platforms, telecommunications providers, law enforcement, policymakers, as well as financial institutions all must play in disrupting criminal fraud networks and preventing victimization,” American Bankers Association President and CEO Rob Nichols said. “We agree with many of the committee’s specific recommendations, including the need for a coordinated all-of-government approach, the removal of barriers preventing collaboration and information sharing within industries and with law enforcement and the harmonization of data collection and reporting systems to create a cohesive system through which individuals and entities can receive and disseminate reports of fraud and scams,” Nichols said. “We also strongly support the report’s call for enhanced telecommunications protections, including stronger authentication and monitoring and the prompt blocking and removal of scam calls, texts and the bad actors behind them.” Finally, the report correctly concluded that the bipartisan SCAM Act could serve as a meaningful step toward addressing fraudulent advertising on social media and reducing opportunities for criminals to target potential victims, he said. The bill (S. 3774 and H.R. 7548) would require online platforms to implement procedures to verify an advertiser’s identity before placing an ad. Platforms must also implement a program to detect impersonation on their site. “We look forward to continuing to work with Congress, the administration and other stakeholders to use this report to energize our fight against fraud and better protect consumers from these increasingly sophisticated threats,” Nichols said. Back to TopABA Banking Journal: ABA highlights banker comments seeking stronger ‘know your customer’ rules for originating providersJuly 28, 2026
The American Bankers Association highlighted the dozens of bankers who wrote to the Federal Communications Commission in support of stronger “know your customer” requirements for voice service providers that originate calls, in a “reply” comment submitted by the association to the FCC on Monday. The commission has proposed a rule to require originating providers to collect a robust set of information from business callers before allowing the caller access to the provider’s network. “The status quo is not acceptable,” ABA said in calling for stronger KYC requirements for originating providers. “Numerous bankers submitted comments that describe the scope of the problem and the need for stronger customer due diligence practices by originating providers.” ABA’s reply comment also cited new data the association obtained that show illegal calls continue to be pervasive. During the first six months of 2026, an ABA consultant analyzed calls illegally spoofing 226 toll-free numbers that belong to 65 financial institutions and healthcare organizations. The data show that an estimated 9 million illegally spoofed calls were “signed” by originating providers — that is, the originating provider attested that the call was legitimate. ABA previously submitted an initial comment that agreed with the FCC’s proposal to require originating providers to collect a robust set of information from business callers — including name, physical address, alternate phone number, corporate formation records and intended use of the provider’s phone service — before the provider allows the caller to originate calls on the provider’s network. Back to TopCISA News: Malicious cloud customers can bring down the power gridDatacenters tax utilities normally, so just imagine what they could do if workloads were designed to destroyJuly 20, 2026
The researchers, Zhouhao Ji, Kaikai Pan, and Wenyuan Xu, from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, describe their technique in a preprint paper titled "Bit2Watt: A Cyber-Physical Vulnerability Exploiting GPU Workloads Across Power and Computing Infrastructures." AI training workloads represent a known challenge for datacenter operators. As Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI noted in a 2025 research paper arguing the need for power stabilization during AI training, the transition from GPU computation to GPU data synchronization causes large power swings to occur. And if the frequency spectrum of these power swings is "harmonized with critical frequencies of utilities, [that] can cause physical damage to the power grid infrastructure." Meta's paper on the training of Llama 3 also cites the risk AI training poses to the power grid. It says, "During training, tens of thousands of GPUs may increase or decrease power consumption at the same time, for example, due to all GPUs waiting for checkpointing or collective communications to finish, or the startup or shutdown of the entire training job. When this happens, it can result in instant fluctuations of power consumption across the datacenter on the order of tens of megawatts, stretching the limits of the power grid." Bit2Watt weaponizes this scenario by proposing that an adversary could use malicious GPU workloads to destabilize the datacenters and electrical infrastructure. "Our results indicate that GPU loads can reach modulation frequencies exceeding 6,000 Hz, compared with only a few hertz observed in conventional household loads such as air conditioners," the Zhejiang University authors state in their paper. "Such high-frequency modulations can substantially induce voltage excursions, harmonic distortion, and damping degradation." The authors claim an attack on a 1-MW local power grid consisting mainly of distributed energy resources like photovoltaics could use 1,000 GPUs to create a total harmonic distortion of 46.8 percent, which would squander nearly half the electrical current on non-productive work and would throw off about 20 percent more heat than normal. "This not only threatens the availability of the computing equipment but also produces a negative damping ratio of -0.27, introducing an unstable mode into the system," the authors contend. "Once the protections are triggered and computing loads are shed, it can trigger cascading failures, potentially leading to blackouts exceeding 80 percent in large-scale power systems." The attack is relatively covert, the authors argue, because it can be launched within authorized workload execution paths and would likely be missed by cloud-provider monitoring frameworks. Thus, they propose that infrastructure providers coordinate defenses across the cyber and physical layers to look for malicious computation patterns. They also emphasize the need for local energy buffering systems to handle power demand spikes. Bit2Watt also potentially opens the door for a side-channel attack called Watt2Bit. The researchers note that the electrical and thermal stress on hardware from a malicious workload creates denial of service events and enables the covert exfiltration of data via power modulation. As a proof of concept, they showed they could recover a 50-bit test sequence using frequency-shift keying (FSK) encoding. "These findings underscore a fundamental shift: as power and computing infrastructures converge, security must be addressed across domains, requiring coordinated defenses that consider workload behavior, power electronics, and grid dynamics," the authors conclude. Back to Top |
A new committee to review state-level regulatory frameworks for stablecoins must adopt strong, transparent rules before it starts making decisions “that will shape the payment stablecoin market for years to come,” the American Bankers Association and three bankers associations said today in a joint comment.
Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee today published a report calling for a coordinated national strategy to combat financial fraud and scams, saying that scams begin long before a customer contacts their bank and require stronger collaboration across government, financial institutions, technology companies, telecommunications providers, law enforcement and other stakeholders.
AI datacenters wreak havoc on the power grid under normal circumstances, so what happens if a bad actor controls all the GPUs and wants to cause harm? Cybersecurity researchers in China have devised a way for malicious tenants to attack their infrastructure provider, potentially causing blackouts or damaging equipment. The attack, dubbed Bit2Watt, imagines an adversary masquerading as a legitimate cloud tenant to launch GPU workloads that have the potential to damage datacenters and supporting electrical systems. It's intended to demonstrate the need to extend cybersecurity defenses to datacenter workload scheduling.
Join banking professionals from across South Dakota for Lead Strong: Women in Banking 2026, an energizing event designed to inspire growth, spark new ideas, and celebrate the power of leadership at every level. This year’s theme, Change the Game, challenges us to think differently, embrace new opportunities, and redefine what’s possible—for ourselves, our organizations, and our industry.
