CommBank's AI boyfriend

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

CBA has been naughty, and too reliant on their AI boyfriend. Here’s what happened:

A CBA customer contacted bank requesting contact details for Secretlab (a company that is not us, and makes chairs)
CBA staff member queried ChatGPT (possibly via their own personal, unauthenticated access to ChatGPT) to obtain phone number for Secretlab (chairs)
CBA staff disclosed the retrieved phone number to the requesting customer
The retrieved phone number is a number belonging to one of the directors of Secret Lab (a company that does not make chairs, and is us), a customer of CBA, and is used for our CBA account and our Director’s CBA account
Therefore, CBA disclosed customer personal information to another, unrelated customer, and trusted a third-party LLM (ChatGPT), accessed seemingly unauthenticated on the consumer ChatGPT platform, as a source for data to provide to another customer
During investigation, CBA staff replicated the same ChatGPT query process, seemingly on a personal phone, again unauthenticated, and on the consumer ChatGPT platform:

Signs indicate this might be routine practice amongst CBA staff

Oh, and they gave out the phone number for us, Secret Lab (not chairs), to someone looking for Secretlab’s (chairs) phone number. So, in the end of all this, they weren’t even helpful. LLMs in a nutshell, really.

Don't use Wise

Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Wise has stolen more than $60,000 AUD from us, and refuses to let us access it.

We’ve had a Wise account for around 5 years (since they were called TransferWise). It’s been a really useful way to transact in foreign currencies, and pay for things when we’re travelling for work.

In early-April 2025, Wise asked us to provide some additional information on our Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs) by uploading a statement of shareholders, and the ID of the owners. Perfectly reasonable stuff for an entity that pretends to be a bank to ask for.

Crooks on Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison

CommBank's AI boyfriend

Don't use Wise