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Get up to speed with all the key Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace statistics, driving pointers, facts and more.

As F1 heads to the Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace for the Sao Paulo Grand Prix, Need To Know is your all-in-one guide with statistics, driving pointers, strategy tips and more.

A few years ago, Yuriy Nazarenko sat at a desk in his grandfather’s apartment in Ukraine and, on a diet of cigarettes, Lay’s chips, and beer, painstakingly made digital copies of fake identity documents. One of his four computer screens had the messaging app Telegram open. Another displayed a scan of a passport in Photoshop filling the entire monitor.

Pixel by pixel, with rap music blaring, Nazarenko edited each part of the passport. That included the MRZ codes, the block of text printed at the bottom of identity documents; the portraits to superimpose someone else’s face into the document; and the overall dimensions and quirks of each different type of passport. Nazarenko would sometimes sit for more than 12 hours at his computer, obsessively tinkering away, with a single, high-quality fake identity document taking up to a week of work.

When someone thinks of fake IDs, maybe they imagine a spotty underage teen buying a physical counterfeit driver’s license so they can score some beer. But in the global criminal underworld, digital copies or scans of IDs are like a skeleton key. A convincing scan of an ID or utility bill, loaded with a bogus name or someone else’s identity, can unlock the ability to make bank accounts, bypass checks on cryptocurrency exchanges to buy or sell more Bitcoin, or rent a safehouse, all while keeping the criminal’s real identity hidden. The digitally altered IDs need to fool both human reviewers and automated systems that scan them for inconsistencies. Making fake IDs requires exquisite attention to detail.

All of that manual labor doesn’t really scale, Nazarenko thought to himself as he meticulously edited passport after passport. He went on to make templates of fake identity documents that sped up the process, but it was still slow. 

After many of these nights, he had an idea. He built a website to automate the process that autopopulated a fake ID with the personal data a customer wanted, rather than having him do it by hand. Then, when generative AI became mainstream a short while later, he incorporated that too.

“That gradually became OnlyFake,” Nazarenko told me.

OnlyFake, the underground website Nazarenko made, landed like a bomb in the fraud world. It allowed anyone to generate not only convincing scans of driver’s licenses or passports, but also realistic looking photos of those fake identity documents laying on a sofa, carpet, or desk, as if someone had taken the ID out of their wallet and snapped a picture of it on their phone. Needed a convincing looking photo of a California driver’s license to open a cryptocurrency account in someone else’s name? Or a British passport to incorporate a company overseas? Or a Social Security card? No problem. The results were photos of identity documents that didn’t really exist, of people who may not be real, but yet could trick the sorts of people and companies that verify documents.

With OnlyFake, you didn’t have to be a master forger like Nazarenko to make fake documents. Now, anyone could churn out fake IDs at scale, sometimes even hundreds or thousands at a time. OnlyFake threatened the entire idea of know-your-customer, or KYC, where financial institutions take steps to know who exactly are using its services. When anyone can make a photo of a fake ID for just a few dollars in Bitcoin, is anyone really who they say they are?

Nazarenko didn’t know it then, hunched over his desk, but OnlyFake would soon become so influential that it would spawn copy cats, and the FBI would eventually hunt Nazarenko and shut down some of OnlyFake’s competitors. The Department of Justice said in an announcement about Nazarenko’s guilty plea that OnlyFake made more than a million dollars selling fake IDs which cost just $15 a pop.

Now for the first time, Nazarenko, 28, free after a year in prison and living in Asia, is telling his story: how North Korean fake IT workers used his creation, how he ended up in ICE detention after serving his sentence in the U.S., and how OnlyFake unleashed a new age of AI-powered fraud. Nazarenko said he wanted to talk to me because I was the first journalist to reveal that OnlyFake existed. This article is based on interviews with Nazarenko and his lawyer, court records, and my own reporting in the online world of fraud that OnlyFake inhabited.  

“OnlyFake was the first time I saw how quickly a small internet project could turn into something global. Unfortunately, it also taught me, in a very painful way, what can happen when the scale of something grows faster than your understanding of its consequences,” Nazarenko told me.

Growing up, Nazarenko’s parents questioned whether Nazarenko would ever find a job. His father worked for the Security Service of Ukraine. Raised in a suburb outside of Odesa, Nazarenko jumped between a few different gigs. He worked as a cook, a waiter, at a supermarket, and as a cameraman at a local Ukrainian TV station.

Nazarenko also ran a YouTube channel about video games. Having a constant need for new graphics and thumbnails, he picked up Photoshop. Over the years, he got better and better. After searching for ways to make money, he discovered that people online would pay for high quality copies of identity documents. Nazarenko got into the business of fake IDs.

“When you zoom in several hundred percent, you begin to understand how complicated even an ordinary passport or driver’s license really is. What looks like a simple plastic card to most people is actually made up of a huge number of small security and design elements,” he told me.

Nazarenko said he hired programmers to start automating the generation of fake identity documents, including one hacker who “used to break into government websites.” He also hired designers; he said he met the workers through personal contacts and “online communities.” At first, OnlyFake didn’t use any AI. Automating parts of it was more about cutting out the busy work. Customers would fill out what name and other personal information they wanted to appear on the ID, upload whatever photograph they wanted, and OnlyFake would then automatically produce an image that looked like a scanned driver’s license or passport.

Eventually, Nazarenko introduced more AI components. His team made a massive bank of fake, AI-generated faces that customers could place into the identity documents. For the backgrounds that the fake IDs would appear on, Nazarenko and his small team first photographed them themselves, then, “as neural networks advanced, we started generating them using AI,” Nazarenko said. 

The key to being able to generate all sorts of different IDs was obtaining lots of different scans. These showed what a Nevada driver’s license, or a Russian passport, or a U.S. passport card looked like, for example. Nazarenko put out a call to action on Telegram. If you have good scans of IDs, I will pay handsomely for them. And he was especially interested in U.S documents. Soon, Nazarenko had a huge library of fake IDs, stretching from Argentina to Spain. He fed these images into OnlyFake. 

“The era of rendering documents using Photoshop is coming to an end,” a post on OnlyFake’s Telegram account read. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Nazarenko left Ukraine and moved around Europe.

Customers could buy individual generations of IDs, or sign up to various subscription plans. The ‘Light’ package for $99 a month gave a user 10 generations. The ‘Ultimate’ $1,500 tier, meanwhile, let a customer upload a spreadsheet of the personal data they wanted to appear on the IDs, making the process even faster, and even came with a direct customer support representative on Telegram. Nazarenko said other criminals were selling fish, while he “was selling the fishing rod.” Rather than paying a forger to make a fake ID, so a criminal could then open a cryptocurrency account under a different name, OnlyFake let the criminals generate the IDs themselves.

It didn’t take long for customers to roll in. Nazarenko would then reinvest the money back into OnlyFake, including advertising his service, pushing development, and making the project bigger.

“At some point, I realized that what I was doing had almost stopped being design work. It had become a constant engineering problem,” Nazarenko said. Beyond making the documents was building infrastructure, automating it all, and keeping the site secure. “In practice, we started operating much like a normal technology startup, except we were operating in an illegal market,” he recalled. Later the Department of Justice said OnlyFake generated at least 10,000 fake IDs, and made $1.2 million over the years.

With customers also comes competitors. OnlyFake had identified a gap in the market for the automatic generation of fake identity documents in bulk, and other people wanted a slice of those profits. Nazarenko said competitors constantly fired distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks at OnlyFake, where hackers bombard a site with so much bogus web traffic that it becomes unusable. Hackers also tried to access OnlyFake’s template database. A rival managed to unmask one of Nazarenko’s employees, and demanded certain concessions from OnlyFake, which Nazarenko says he denied. 

Nazarenko’s days were consumed with customers and orders; then nights were spent working on tweaking the documents. To stay up, he turned to coffee and energy drinks. Then cocaine.

With real money coming in, competitors hounding him, and the stress and paranoia that comes with that, Nazarenko started using other drugs to try to cope with the pressure, he said. He used LSD, magic mushrooms, and ecstasy. “That wasn’t about work anymore, it was about feeling something other than anxiety, about switching off a head that hadn’t switched off in years,” he said.

In early 2024, I discovered OnlyFake myself while scrolling through Telegram. I logged in, sent a small amount of cryptocurrency to the site, and generated some photos of fake IDs. I was blown away by the pictures of fake IDs laying on a carpet and upholstery. The implications for fraud were staggering, I thought. It seemed like it would shatter KYC practices — where cryptocurrency companies, for example, verify someone’s identity by having them upload a copy of their passport. What use is KYC when anyone can generate an identity document of essentially anyone else?

I entered the name David Creeks, put in a random birthday, and the site autofilled a bunch of other important information like the license’s issue and expiry dates. Just minutes later, I had photos of my California driver’s license laying on a rug. I made a British passport too.

After I made a couple of fake IDs with OnlyFake, I put them to the test. I successfully signed up for an account on OKX, a cryptocurrency exchange, using my fictitious ID. Former OKX employees later told me my test triggered a wave of changes inside the cryptocurrency exchange, who scrambled to make its systems more resilient to AI-generated IDs. (OKX did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

While reporting that initial article, Abhishek Mathew, a cybersecurity researcher who followed the site’s growth, told me criminals were using OnlyFake to make bank accounts, or to unban their cryptocurrency accounts on Binance when asked for identification. 

At the time, I messaged the administrator of OnlyFake, who went by the handle John Wick. Only now do I know that to be Nazarenko. Nazarenko, by then living at an apartment in Poland, said the generated photos could be used to bypass verification on all sorts of other sites, including Airbnb, Coinbase, and Revolut. Nazarenko also said, unconvincingly, “using our site for the purpose of forging documents is prohibited.”

At the time, the article received a lot of attention from researchers in the fraud world, and the public saw for the first just how AI could supercharge the creation of fake IDs. 

With the article spreading, Nazarenko panicked. He deleted all of his personal emails, destroyed his laptop, and bought a new phone. He thought authorities would arrest him that very same day. 

Nazarenko also made an announcement on the OnlyFake Telegram channel to his customers, and anyone else who might have taken a sudden interest in the site: “The news says that our generator was used to forge documents. This is complete nonsense. This has never happened before. At a minimum, because it cannot be used to forge documents.”

Charitably, perhaps Nazarenko was positing a deeply philosophical point about truth and reality: how can these documents be forgeries if the documents don’t actually exist? Really, he was covering his ass, fully aware he was offering a service that enabled criminals, and had been for years. 

“At the time I hid behind ‘the client decides how to use it.’ That's a convenient thing to tell yourself so you don’t have to look at the real picture,” Nazarenko told me later. He knew that the documents he was creating could be used by someone to drain another person’s account, or launder money, or hide who they really were while doing all sorts of damage, he said. 

After the article came out, the DDoS attacks against OnlyFake increased, Nazarenko said. He also received word that some very powerful people were taking advantage of his site.

On February 26, 2024, the United Nations wrote a letter to OnlyFake. It was on official UN letterhead, but OnlyFake, being a criminal enterprise, did not have a public office. So the UN sent a PDF of the letter to OnlyFake’s email account listed on the site.

“Dear Sir/Madam,” the letter, obviously not knowing who actually ran OnlyFake, started. “The Panel has received information that DPRK IT workers have utilized your service.”

The letter said that North Koreans had been using OnlyFakes to apply for remote work in the U.S.

As has been widely documented, thousands of North Koreans working for the regime got remote work jobs with U.S. companies, especially during the pandemic, and funnelled their wages back to North Korea to fund its nuclear weapon program. The UN letter said some of these workers were using OnlyFake to make fake IDs to sign up for freelance job sites, social media networks, and payment platforms. Alongside the country’s huge hacking campaigns against cryptocurrency exchanges, it was an ingenious way for North Korea to make more money.

The UN said it had information showing DPRK IT workers used OnlyFake to generate fake passports and driver’s licenses. Now, the UN wanted Nazarenko to hand over a ton of user data: a list of DPRK IT workers who had used OnlyFake; copies of all the documents OnlyFake had made for the DPRK; and what steps, if any, OnlyFake had taken to stop DPRK workers from using the site. (North Korean hackers recently stole $6.3 billion from cryptocurrency exchange Binance, in what is widely seen as one of the biggest hacks ever.)

The letter also addressed PassportCloud, a website that sold Photoshop templates of fake IDs and utility bills, and said North Koreans had used it to make fake bank statements and credit cards. I originally found OnlyFake after I first discovered PassportCloud and the sites appeared to be connected (one clue: it also used John Wick in its marketing). I asked Nazarenko multiple times if he was behind Passport Cloud too, but he never directly confirmed nor denied his involvement.

The UN demand was surreal to Nazarenko. He said he felt like he had only recently been working on a relatively small project. Now the UN was contacting him about how North Korean moles were probably using his service. He refused to give the UN anything, but looking back later, he said this is one of the first moments he realized he was in over his head. And for Nazarekno, it was about to get worse. A deeper threat was watching the growth of OnlyFake too: the FBI.

In May 2024, a few months after I published my article, a law enforcement agent working with prosecutors in the Southern District of New York went undercover. First, they bought a fake New York state identification card from OnlyFake, according to court records. Then they bought a fake U.S. passport card. Just over a week later, they purchased a New York state driver’s license and a U.S. passport. A couple of days later, they bought a fake Social Security card. OnlyFake, of course, happily provided all of these. OnlyFake’s customer support also told an undercover agent how best to use the fake IDs to circumvent KYC at cryptocurrency exchanges.

For someone who made a living protecting the identities of other criminals, Nazarenko had been very sloppy with his own security. When making the site and cashing out its proceeds, he sent Bitcoin to a cryptocurrency exchange account in his own name. Despite being a forger, he hadn’t bothered to make another identity.

It was trivial for authorities to identify who ran OnlyFake. Ukrainian authorities searched his parents’ house, Nazarenko said. Then on June 13, 2025, when Nazarenko flew to Bucharest, Romania, with his girlfriend for a friend’s birthday, the border officer took Nazarenko’s passport and spent an unusually long time looking at his computer. While being questioned in another room, authorities told Nazarenko there was a U.S. warrant out for his arrest. He was handcuffed, and for Nazarenko, everything “suddenly became very real.” Authorities seized some of OnlyFake’s servers too, Nazarenko said.

He spent three months in a Romanian prison before being extradited to New York. In Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, prison officials transferred Nazarenko to another part of the facility when gang members assaulted him, according to a letter his lawyer later submitted in court. 

“I was building something that could be used to harm people, and I was making money from it. I did not fully understand that until I was sitting inside a concrete cell,” Nazarenko said.

Igor Litvak, Nazarenko’s lawyer, said Nazarenko offered to cooperate with the authorities, including providing potential customers’ information. Litvak said he even showed the UN’s letter to the FBI, which indicated the sort of person who used this platform. But prosecutors didn’t take Nazarenko up on his offer. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York acknowledged a request for comment but did not respond to an email asking why authorities didn’t enter a cooperation arrangement with Nazarenko.

This June, around a year after his initial arrest, a judge sentenced Nazarenko to time served of 12 months, a remarkably light sentence compared to the maximum penalty of 15 years in prison. Perhaps this was due in part to the fact that authorities did not identify any specific victims of OnlyFake — only that the site existed and it was used to make IDs. For much of his time in prison, OnlyFake continued to be up and running, just with its owner locked away, Litvak said.

That wasn’t the end of Nazarenko’s time in detention, though. As he prepared to leave the court room, thinking his lawyer would immediately drive him to the airport so he could self-deport, ICE officials detained Nazarenko. He spent another two months in detention. “It was much, MUCH worse than prison,” Nazarenko said, referring to having to sleep on the floor and people dying in the facility.

On August 17, Nazarenko was deported along with several other Ukrainians on a chartered flight. When he finally walked out of the airport in Poland, then was taken by land to Ukraine, he had only what he was holding. “Everything’s gone, and I’m still here,” he remembered thinking. Nazarenko said he was then taken to a military enlistment office and drafted for the war. He says he escaped, left Ukraine on foot, and then flew eventually to Thailand. 

OnlyFake spawned a bunch of copycat sites. The FBI targeted at least one and some of them have already shut down, but more keep springing up. In some ways, criminals don’t even need an underground site to make fake IDs. Researchers have used commercial AI chatbots to make photos of people holding up identity documents, although the main labs continue to put safeguards around their tech. And companies have bolstered their defenses against at least some AI-generated fake IDs, including those from OnlyFake during its lifespan, meaning they can detect signs the ID is fake even if it looks real to a person.

Now Nazarenko is working on an app, called TapMap, a social network and event finding app focused on Thailand that his lawyer brought up as evidence that Nazarenko won’t go into crime again. “For the first time in a long while, I had something I wanted a clear head for,” Nazarenko told me, referring to making the app and stopping drinking.

Nazarenko first sent me an email on August 21, just a few days after he was deported. When I asked him to send something to help verify he was the real Yuriy Nazarenko, he sent me a photo of his passport.

I used an online tool to figure out whether this was a genuine photo of his passport, or whether any part of it was AI-generated. Those tools said there was no evidence of AI manipulation.

Huge, ecstatic canvases are just one of the vocations of the musician who joined the art rockers in 2024. As her show Hotwire My Heart opens, she talks terror, awe and teabags

Emma Richardson loves to eavesdrop when people look at her paintings and talk about what they see in them. “They turn into these Rorschach inkblot tests,” she grins. Looking at her works, you do stand back in awe wondering. Is that a nebula, a god or a fleshy, baroque orgy? An explosion, an implosion or an orgasm? Richardson implies all of these and more, her paintbrush chasing in vivid oils the hedonism, desire and breadth of human experience.

This fascination with the transcendent has in part been informed by her other life as a musician, formerly in the garage-rock trio Band of Skulls and currently playing bass and singing in Pixies.

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The BLVD is home to 250 enterprises, from banks, tattoo shops and restaurants to museums and a performing arts centre

Passing through the Mojave desert on State Route 14, going by landscapes Hollywood uses to represent alien planets, a driver might not expect to find a walkable, tree-lined boulevard.

But there are nine beautiful, leafy blocks on West Lancaster Boulevard, a piece of what used to be Highway 14. They were redeveloped as part of a mixed-use urban streetscape in the city of Lancaster, California in 2010.

The BLVD, as it’s been rebranded, is home to 250 public and private enterprises, from banks, tattoo shops and restaurants to museums, a performing arts centre and a public library. City Hall is just a block south.

The city invested $11.5m (£8.5m) to transform a busy thoroughfare into an inviting public space. The three lanes in the centre of the former five-lane road were replaced by a series of tree-lined ramblas – Spanish for “avenue” and “watercourse,” because dry stream beds served as streets in early cities.

The redesign was planned and funded by the city of redevelopment agency. Within four years of completion, it had generated more than $270m in economic output, attracted $130m in investment, created hundreds of jobs and prompted the building or renovation of hundreds of housing units, according to the city.

The revitalisation has also created more intangible benefits, residents say.. The city centre the feels like a gathering space, they said — somewhere where they can feel like part of a community.

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Ahead of the Democrats’ ‘Blue-nami’, some of the team behind our epic results page explained the work that goes into preparing for every election night

On millions of screens around the world this week, the colour of the US electoral map digitally transposed. But behind the pixelated blue states and red states there were really 50 shades of purple.

Some midterm races for the Senate and House of Representatives were closer than others. Some swings didn’t represent an actual shift in party allegiance. The shades and nuances in each race were always going to be important this year, with expectations that many Republican supporters wouldn’t turn out for their party because of specific issues, such as inflation, fuel prices, the Iran war, datacentres, or Donald Trump’s toxicity.

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Start with the feeling, not the activities, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Making more room for enjoyment is also making more room for your actual self

• Read more Leading questions

I’m a child of first-generation immigrants and have always carried a story of survival and resilience. My parents were part of a “lost generation” who sacrificed a lot to put us all through university. There was a very defined path for success, some of which I followed and some not. I married outside of race; I made work choices for financial stability. I don’t know how to enjoy things that other people seem to. Hobbies, travelling, home renovations … I look at those like “what is the point?”

I want to say it’s because my upbringing was not full of leisure activities; my parents only allowed us to focus on academic topics. Now that I’m a mother though, I wonder how I can role model some of this “living well for its own sake” for my children. It’s hard to find simple joys actually joyful. Growing up, everything needed to be “applied” towards something, and it feels that mentality is informing everything I do. Any advice on how to break free and live in the moment?

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Bavarian Radio SO/Rattle
(BR Klassik)
Simon Rattle has recorded the Russian master’s fairytale ballet twice before, but this version has considerable gains, not least in Rattle’s engaging half hour talk about it

Simon Rattle and Stravinsky’s fairytale ballet go way back. A longtime staple of his repertoire, he recorded it with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in the late 1980s, a 2017 concert performance with the LSO was released in 2022. This similarly live account with his current Bavarian orchestra comes with a bonus: an engaging half-hour talk with musical examples, ideal for newcomers or anyone keen to take a deeper dive into the history of the Russian master’s breakthrough work.

All three Rattle recordings are of the complete score from 1910, though this latest interpretation is the swiftest, knocking several minutes off his previous readings and aided by an ideally natural acoustic. The gains are apparent not just in the dramatic thrust he achieves but in the diaphanous textures.

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Trump is still president, and we don’t know where things will go from here – but sometimes it just feels good to see some terrible people have a terrible time

The last couple of days have been very bad for Donald Trump. Of course, in Trump’s usual style, he is denying that the Republican loss at the midterms has anything to do with him – but we all know it does. While I fear the Democrats will not use this decisive moment to exercise some ambition and take meaningful action, the goings-on of the last couple of days have been undeniably fun to watch.

Seeing so many conservatives lose in such a spectacular way has blessed millions across the globe with powerful schadenfreude. It is a much needed moment of relief, an experience of positivity to rejuvenate our ailing nervous systems (or whatever biology does). Sometimes you just need to see some terrible people have a terrible time. For me, it’s just been the icing on a cake I’ve been dining out on for the last couple of months: watching Trump supporters watch Trump describing other men’s bodies in detail.

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Freshly harvested olive oil is one of life’s simplest pleasures, and the time to enjoy it is now

A few years ago, we were lucky enough to meet Maggie and Martin, the wonderful couple behind Mother’s Garden, an olive grove in Catalonia, whose adventures were documented in the Channel 4 series No Going Back. And during that meeting, they crystallised something for us that we had never properly considered before: an olive is a fruit, so olive oil is, essentially, fruit juice.

Think of a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, how bright and alive it tastes, bursting with fragrance and flavour. Now think of that same juice after a few days in the fridge or poured from a carton. It still tastes of oranges, yes, but something is missing. Olive oil is much the same, although, being oil, it tastes more stable. Fresh olive oil hums with flavour, plays tricks on the tongue and is bursting with layers. In fact, it is a completely different experience from the regular stuff.

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Dismissals follow Houthi victories and pressure from southern Yemenis for more power

The UN-recognised government of Yemen has shaken up its political and military leadership in an attempt to regain territory lost to the Houthis in September and lift the four-week siege of Taiz, the country’s third largest city.

A counteroffensive launched on 5 October and aimed at liberating the entire country from Houthi control has failed amid fighting that has left thousands dead on both sides. The air superiority of the government’s ally Saudi Arabia – which has had to fend off near-daily Houthi attacks on its airports and military bases – has not translated into progress on the ground.

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Het aantal auto-inbraken in Rotterdam en omgeving is flink gestegen. In de eerste negen maanden van dit jaar registreerde de politie 5590 inbraken en diefstallen uit auto's in de regio. Dat is 44 procent meer dan in dezelfde periode vorig jaar.

Wanneer je de kamer van Karel Omrani (12) inloopt, struikel je over de skateboards, stapels met schoenendozen én skate-tijdschriften. De Rotterdammer behoort tot de beste skaters van Nederland in zijn leeftijdscategorie en werkt stap voor stap aan zijn uiteindelijke doel: de Olympische Spelen.

In aanloop naar de vergadering van de Tweede Kamer over het cultuurbeleid doet de Kunstenbond namens de cultuursector een dringende oproep aan de politiek: stop de diefstal van ons werk door de AI van techbedrijven en zorg voor een eerlijke vergoeding voor wat wij maken.

Op een bepaalde manier kan Donald Trump mij altijd aan het lachen krijgen. Dat gebeurt vooral als hij anderen de schuld geeft van zijn falen.

Hackers have targeted European supermarket refrigeration units in recent weeks, turning up temperatures and spoiling millions of euros worth of frozen goods.

The Excel copy-and-paste bug is back, which means Microsoft is making a second round of fixes. The bug first appeared in the September update and manifested in multiple versions of Excel as a silent failure of the paste operation. Users copied content and attempted to paste it, but the destination cell was unchanged no matter how hard they mashed the Ctrl+V keys. Microsoft fixed it in mid-September. But it made a comeback in Excel 2016 when users installed October's security update. Microsoft has now released a new build of Excel 2016 to address the reintroduction of the bug: build 16.0.5574.1006. The company wrote: "The new build includes all security updates for Microsoft Excel 2016, and also fixes the issue that was reintroduced in 16.0.5574.1005, in which paste operations might fail if the workbook contains conditional formatting." Microsoft did not explain how the bug slipped back in. Copy and paste is, after all, a niche bit of functionality. Users reported the recurrence of the bug in October after the KB5002934 update was applied. Rolling back the update resolved the problem until Windows Update pushed the patch again. KB5002934 is a security update that resolves glitches including remote code execution and information disclosure vulnerabilities. The problem affects only Excel 2016 and is not the result of the latest Windows security update. Rather, it was reintroduced in an Excel update delivered through Windows Update. A user in a Microsoft Excel forum said the issue had appeared on workstations throughout their organization. "What's frustrating is that this is the same issue we encountered before, which was supposedly fixed in a previous update. Now it's back, barely a few weeks later." And now, at least, it appears to be fixed once again. Still, if Microsoft is determined to reintroduce bugs into Excel, perhaps it might also be tempted to bring back the Hall of Tortured Souls (a secret first-person 3D mini-game hidden inside Microsoft Excel for Windows 95) and populate it with the testers who managed to miss the issue's resurrection. ®

Inloggen lukt niet, pinnen lukt ook niet meer in het beloofde land van de wakkere wappies. Sinds dinsdag 3 november kunnen ongeveer 3 miljoen klanten van Ueno Bank in Paraguay niet bij hun geld, zo’n 60 procent van de volwassen bevolking. Hoe kon een bank zo groot worden, en wat zou er gebeuren als dit in Nederland gebeurt?

Centrale bank grijpt in na leningen aan eigenaars

Het bestuur van de centrale bank van Paraguay besloot maandagavond 2 november unaniem Ueno onder curatele te stellen, meldt Latin Times. Een dag later namen toezichthouders de bank over om de bezittingen veilig te stellen.

Ueno groeide snel nadat het van een financieringsmaatschappij een volwaardige bank werd. In juni waarschuwde de centrale bank al dat Ueno te veel geld leende aan bedrijven van de eigenaars, Grupo Vázquez. De buffer van de bank kalfde af tot onder de helft van het wettelijke minimum. Daarna moest de toezichthouder ingrijpen.

Tot €33.000 per rekening gegarandeerd

Het garantiefonds van de centrale bank vergoedt tot 228,3 miljoen guaraní per rekening, omgerekend ongeveer 38.000 dollar of zo’n €33.000 (koers 5 november 2026). Daarmee is volgens voorlopige cijfers van de centrale bank 97 procent van de klanten volledig gedekt.

Wie meer had staan, krijgt geen garantie. De toezichthouder belooft alleen “de grootst mogelijke bescherming”.

Ook de staat zelf is geraakt. Het staatspensioen- en zorgfonds IPS heeft zo’n 380 miljoen dollar in obligaties en deposito’s van Ueno, meldden Reuters en AP. Ongeveer 32.000 gepensioneerden kregen hun uitkering via de bank. Hun novemberpensioen loopt via een andere bank.

De centrale bank heeft rust nodig om haar werk te doen.

Politieke rel rond president Peña

De bankval is ook een politieke crisis. Carvallo was van 2021 tot medio 2023 voorzitter van Financiera Ueno, de voorloper van de bank, en werd daarna door de regering van president Santiago Peña aan het hoofd van de centrale bank gezet. Hij zegt zich buiten alle besluiten over Ueno te hebben gehouden, maar tekende op verzoek van Peña zijn ontslag.

Peña had volgens de krant ABC Color tot maart 2025 aandelen in Ueno Holding. Hij ontkent aandeelhouder van de bank zelf te zijn geweest. De oppositie werkt aan een afzettingsprocedure en het Openbaar Ministerie is een strafonderzoek begonnen. In de hoofdstad Asunción gingen dinsdag mensen de straat op om hun spaargeld terug te eisen.

Zoveel krijg jij terug als je Nederlandse bank omvalt

In Nederland ligt de grens drie keer zo hoog. Het depositogarantiestelsel, dat De Nederlandsche Bank ( DNB) uitvoert, vergoedt tot €100.000 per persoon per bank. Een paar dingen om te weten:

• Het geldt per bank, niet per merk. Sommige spaarlabels vallen onder één bankvergunning. Heb je bij twee labels van dezelfde bank geld, dan telt dat samen. In het register van DNB zie je onder welke vergunning je bank valt.
• Een en/of-rekening telt per persoon. Met je partner ben je dus tot €200.000 gedekt.
• Tijdelijk meer na een huisverkoop. Komt er geld van de verkoop van je eigen huis op je rekening, dan geldt soms een hogere dekking, tot €500.000 extra.
• Niet alles valt eronder. Een achtergesteld deposito, beleggingen en crypto worden niet vergoed.

DNB betaalt binnen zeven werkdagen uit. Het stelsel moest voor het laatst groot uitbetalen in 2009, bij de val van DSB Bank. Hoe je intussen meer rente krijgt, lees je in het grote rentegat bij Nederlandse spaarders. Wat er gebeurt als het om crypto gaat, staat in het faillissement van cryptoplatform Knaken.

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Bronnen: Latin Times, Al Jazeera, Rijksoverheid