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A new personal productivity app called Ocean is launching to help you triage your overloaded inbox, take action on your emails by turning them into tasks, and share your availability for meetings with others, all in one app.

Today, Gmail so heavily dominates the email market that few challengers emerge. Understanding this, Ocean made the decision to work with Gmail, not compete against it. As a third-party client, gaining a footing in the market can be difficult, but successful email apps have proven lucrative acquisitions. Yahoo bought email app Xobni for $60 million and Microsoft snapped up Accompli for $200 million in the previous decade, for instance.

This market opportunity attracted co-founders Martin Dufort and Scott Lake — an early Shopify co-founder — who created BigWaveLabs in early 2019 and began to tackle email. This work ultimately resulted in Ocean, an app focused on more efficient email management.

The app works with Gmail or Google Workspace accounts, allowing users to turn their emails into tasks and action items so they’re not forgotten.

To make this work, the app includes its own Task Manager that has access to the user’s email. That means you don’t have to copy or paste information into an external to-do app while instead gaining access to features that go beyond what Google’s task manager offers Gmail users.

With Ocean, you can create tasks using rich formatting, set due dates, organize tasks into folders, and link emails to your task’s notes. It can also automatically pull out action items from longer emails for you.

You can choose to manage the emails you mean to reply to later by creating a task as well, instead of leaving them unread or applying a label of some sort.

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Image Credits:BigWave Labs Inc.

For inbox zero enthusiasts, the killer feature will be Ocean’s inbox triage tools.

The app lets you filter emails by categories like first-timers (people who emailed you for the first time), persistent pingers (people who email you repeatedly), and emails from your contacts. It can even surface emails that are marked as spam but might belong in your inbox, so you don’t miss anything important.

Ocean also offers subscription management tools — a feature Gmail recently added — in addition to the baseline email functions of composing, replying, flagging, archiving, and deleting email.

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Plus, Ocean offers built-in meeting scheduling tools that let you set your availability based on your pending and booked events. Here, you can set your open times and block others from booking those meetings at the last minute, which is a handy trick.

You can also send an automated email invite to meeting recipients, confirm meeting proposals from a web interface, and automatically add confirmed meetings to your calendar.

The Ocean iPhone app has just launched, but a new Mac app is in the works, which will include iCloud sync. The company aims to generate revenue via its non-recurring membership model, Ocean Blue, which costs $67. However, interested users can first put it to the test with a 14-day free trial that doesn’t automatically convert you into a paying subscriber.

If you, like practically anyone else with a cell phone in the U.S. and beyond, have received a scam text message about an unpaid toll or undelivered mail item, there’s a good chance you have been targeted by a prolific scamming operation.

The scam isn’t particularly complex, but it has been highly effective. By sending spam text messages that look like genuine notifications for popular services, from postal deliveries to local government programs, unsuspecting victims click a link that loads a phishing page, they enter their credit card details, and that information is swiped and used for fraud.

During a period of seven months in 2024, the scam netted at least 884,000 stolen credit card details, allowing scammers to cash in on their victims’ accounts. Some victims lost thousands of dollars in the scam, researchers say.

But a series of opsec mistakes ultimately led security researchers and investigative journalists to the real-world identity of the maker of the scamming software, Magic Cat, who researchers say goes by the handle Darcula. 

Image Credits:via Mnemonic

As revealed by the Oslo-headquartered security firm Mnemonic and reported in tandem by Norwegian media earlier this year, behind the fluffy cute cat in Darcula’s profile photos is a 24-year-old Chinese national named Yucheng C.

The researchers say Yucheng C. develops Magic Cat for his hundreds of customers, who use the software to launch their own SMS text message scam campaigns at their victims.

Soon after he was unmasked, Darcula went dark and his scam operation has not seen any updates since, leaving his customers in the lurch. But in its wake, a new operation has emerged and is already vastly outpacing its predecessor.

Researchers are now sounding the alarm on the new fraud operation, Magic Mouse, which rose from the ashes of Magic Cat. 

Ahead of sharing new findings at the Def Con security conference in Las Vegas on Friday, Harrison Sand, an offensive security consultant at Mnemonic, told TechCrunch that Magic Mouse has been surging in popularity since the demise of Darcula’s Magic Cat. 

Sand also warned of the operation’s growing ability to steal people’s credit cards on a massive scale.

During their investigation, Mnemonic found photos from inside the operation posted in a Telegram channel that Darcula administered, showing a line-up of credit card payment terminals and videos showing racks with dozens of phones used for automating the sending of messages to victims. 

The scammers use the card details in mobile wallets on phones and conduct payment fraud, laundering their funds into other bank accounts. Some of the phones had mobile wallets overflowing with other people’s stolen cards, ready to be used for mobile transactions. 

Sand told TechCrunch that Magic Mouse is already responsible for the theft of at least 650,000 credit cards a month.

While evidence suggests Magic Mouse is an entirely new operation, coded by new developers and likely unrelated to Darcula, much of Magic Mouse’s success stems from the new operators stealing the phishing kits that made its predecessor’s software so popular. Sand said these kits contain hundreds of phishing sites that Magic Cat used to mimic the legitimate web pages of major tech giants, popular consumer services, and delivery firms, all designed to trick victims into handing over their credit card details.

But despite the prolific nature of Magic Cat and, now, Magic Mouse, and their ability to net millions of dollars in stolen funds from consumers, Sand told TechCrunch in a call that law enforcement is not looking beyond a few scattered reports of fraud or at the wider operation behind the scheme. 

Instead, Sand said, it is the tech companies and financial giants who shoulder much of the responsibility for allowing these scams to exist and thrive, and for not making it more difficult for scammers to use stolen cards. 

As for anyone who receives a suspicious text, ignoring an unwanted message might be the best policy.