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I've been asked many times why, as a Chemical Engineer, I landed up in IT. I tell them that when I graduated in Chemical Engineering as far back as 1985, chemical plants were highly automated and hardly required any humans. OTOH, then, and now, IT is a very manual job requiring a lot of human workers (which is why the IT industry has absorbed tons of engineers, not only from the traditional Computer Science and Electrical Engineering fields, but also from chemical, civil, mechanical, and other core engineering branches). For the first time, I see a shift in that paradigm. Going by my own dabbling with ChatGPT for coding, coding is ceasing to be manual and is poised to become highly automated. Ergo I can easily get behind Tom Blomfield's analogy of software engineers tending their own farms in the past to being replaced en masse by combine harvester now. 

Kudos to the court for this verdict. 

In my blog post titled Fraud v Scam: Who Is Liable For Cybercrime and many subsequent comments, I'd said:

"People want to hold the Alleged Scammer's bank responsible on the ground that it opened an account in the name of the Alleged Scammer despite doing KYC. They seem to assume that KYC is character certification. But it's not. As long as you produce the necessary KYC documents, a bank is not under any obligation to vet your character before opening an account in your name (Not legal advice.)".

In response, some people claimed that payee bank is indeed responsible for vetting the payee as part of KYC / KYB and should not open an account for him / her.

This verdict renders the point moot. Even assuming that the payee bank is responsible and has failed in its duty, this verdict makes it clear that that's a different infraction and that the payee bank is still not responsible to the payor / victim for his / her loss.  

Great stuff. Just like the dropping of frivolous lawsuits against Zelle, CapitalOne, etc.