Three things worth knowing this month
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The scam doing the rounds
The Central Bank’s 2025 figures landed this month: €179 million lost to fraud in Ireland, up 27% in a year. The part worth noticing is which kind grew. Authorised push payment fraud (nobody hacks anything, they just talk you into sending the money yourself) is now 45% of all fraud by value, and the credit transfer share of it almost doubled, to about €53 million.
No bank security failed in any of those. Firewalls do nothing about it. One thing does: ringing a number you already had before the request arrived. Not the number in the email.
A price worth knowing
Memory is climbing again. DRAM contract prices are forecast up another 13–18% this quarter, NAND another 10–15%, on top of a run that has already put some DDR5 kits past four times their 2025 price. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer and Asus have all now warned that finished machines follow, by roughly 15–20%.
Nobody credible sees relief before mid-2027. So if you were replacing a machine in the new year anyway, it's cheaper bought now. If one is coping fine, leave it alone. It's the worst possible thing to spend memory money on this year.
One thing to check
Since last October every euro-area bank must run Verification of Payee: when a customer types your IBAN, their bank checks the name against your account and warns them if it doesn't match.
The catch: your account is often in the registered company name while your invoices carry the trading name. If those differ, every customer paying you gets a mismatch warning at the exact moment they're handing over money. Some will stop, which is what the warning is for.
Two minutes, free: open your last invoice and your online banking and make the account name match what you ask people to type. If it can't match, print it beside the IBAN.
Where these came from
Fraud figures: FraudSMART / BPFI, 4 September 2026, reporting Central Bank of Ireland data for 2025. Memory pricing: TrendForce contract price forecasts and PC maker guidance. Verification of Payee: BPFI.
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