Search results for identity theft
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Posted
Sep 03 2009, 11:56 AM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Don Godding didn't review his credit card statements each month. He simply mailed a $200 minimum payment and called it good.
So he didn't realize that someone had fraudulently charged about $11,000 to his account over two months or that his balance had shot up to $18,000, according to TheDenverChannel.com. And, because of two other mistakes he made, he's on the hook for that amount, plus interest.
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Posted
Sep 02 2009, 06:25 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Paul Michael at partner blog Wise Bread.
It's not a fun feeling. You've reached the checkout at the grocery store, you feel inside your pocket or purse, and you realize that your wallet is missing. You heart stops, you walk out without your shopping and proceed to panic.
But there is one way you can significantly increase the chance of your wallet being returned intact.
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Posted
Aug 31 2009, 09:03 AM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
If Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, can be a victim of identity theft, is anyone safe from this crime? That has to be in the mind of anyone who's heard about the incident.
The trouble began when someone stole Anna Bernanke's purse from the back of her chair at Starbucks, according to The Washington Post. A week later, someone deposited $900 from the couple's bank account into an account at a different bank. Ten people have been charged in connection with an ID theft ring that victimized the Bernankes and hundreds of others. Total alleged take by the crooks: more than $2.1 million.
The case is considered unusual because it combines an exceedingly low-tech crime with a high-stakes ID theft operation. "I find this case interesting because it's a crime ring engaged in activities that have been primarily the purview of petty individual criminals -- purse snatching," Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, told The Associated Press.
The preventative measure in this case is pretty simple: Keep your checkbook, credit cards, etc., close to the vest.
But there are so many other ways that ID thieves can rip you off.
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Posted
Aug 11 2009, 03:17 PM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
Is there anything an iPhone can't do, except perhaps scrub the toilet (near the toilet bowl is not where you want your phone to be) or take out the trash?
And now, we have to wonder, could smart phones make bank tellers obsolete? (You've seen tellers from time to time, haven't you? Always helpful and smiling despite standing all day long for horrible wages.)
A privately owned bank that has one brick-and-mortar branch but serves mostly U.S. military members around the world has debuted a new feature of its iPhone app that allows customers to deposit paper checks electronically.
You photograph both sides of the check "and once you hit the send button, that image is going into our deposit-taking system as any other check would," Wayne Peacock, a USAA executive vice president, told The New York Times. At that point, you can void the check and shred it.
Many have heralded this advance. Chris Ziegler of engadget wrote, "The problem with banks, you see, is that they're one of the few remaining weak links in our ultimate goal of eliminating all human interaction. ... Fortunately, USAA ... is helping to close that loop with its Deposit@Mobile service."
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Posted
Jul 14 2009, 04:15 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
A bank in South Africa equipped 11 of its ATMs with pepper spray to deter crooks from blowing them up or installing a card-skimming device.
Unfortunately, pepper spray was released during routine maintenance on one of the ATMs, necessitating medical treatment for three innocent people, Web site IOL reports.
Readers were not impressed with the new security feature. "Imagine getting sprayed by a malfunctioning ATM. At which point you will be an easy target if any muggers are around," one anonymous commenter wrote.
Reader "MrDickens" said, "Oh man, PLEASE let me get sprayed by mistake. I relish the opportunity to sue a bank. Imagine getting a bank to pay YOU money."
Maybe this remedy to ATM fraud has a few bugs. But banks are increasingly nervous as attacks on the security of ATMs escalate.
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Posted
Jul 10 2009, 08:07 AM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This guest post comes from Frank Curmudgeon at Bad Money Advice.
The latest hot topic on the identity theft front is a paper published on Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by two professors at Carnegie Mellon on how easy it is to guess a person's Social Security number.
That day Ars Technica reported on it. Also, the authors of the paper started a blog on it. The Associated Press picked it up Tuesday. CrunchGear blogged on it then too. And Wednesday brought posts from Wise Bread and WalletPop.
This is a great story. It combines several of my favorite themes. There's the ever amusing hysteria over identity theft, which apparently renders a person incapable of rational thought and perspective. There are the unintended consequences of seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time government policies. And there is the recurring phenomenon of folks who report and comment on academic papers without reading and/or understanding them.
The researchers, Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross, developed a methodology for guessing SSNs based on publicly available databases and some often publicly available data about people, specifically their date and place of birth. The method is orders of magnitude less accurate than suggested in the blogosphere, but it may be a lot more accurate than you might imagine. To understand why requires a bit of a lesson on the history and mechanics of Social Security numbers.
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Posted
Jun 15 2009, 06:19 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from J.D. Roth at partner blog Get Rich Slowly.
Recently I had lunch with Hardy, a Get Rich Slowly reader here in Portland, Ore. We chatted about life (and personal finance) over burgers and fries. He generously offered to pay the bill. When the waitress returned with the credit card slip, she asked to see his driver's license.
"What was that all about?" I asked.
"Asking for my ID?" said Hardy. I nodded. He flipped over his credit card and showed it to me. He'd written "see ID" where his signature ought to be.
"Does that work?" I asked.
"Some of the time," he said. "It gives you an idea of which places are paying attention. But not every place will accept it. It's technically against the rules because the card has to be signed. Plus, businesses aren't really allowed to ask to see your ID."
"What do you do if they refuse to take your card?" I asked.
"I carry a backup," Hardy said. "This is my main card. My backup card has my signature, but I rarely have to use it. The only place that I know will refuse the main card every time is the post office. I have to use a signed card there."
I was intrigued by this attempt to thwart identity theft, so when I got home I asked my Twitter followers:
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Posted
May 12 2009, 06:02 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from Jim Wang at partner blog Bargaineering.
Do you know why credit cards have an expiration date? In the beginning, it was because a credit card had a limited useful lifespan. After a few years, the magnetic stripe on the back would either get demagnetized or damaged so much that it was unreadable.
It wasn't until later that the expiration date was used as a security feature. For many years, you could continue to use expired credit cards because the stripe was fine and the expiration date wasn't used for verification.
So what are you to do with an expired card? You have to destroy it, of course. In our age of identity theft and fraud, only a fool would throw a credit card into the trash without cutting it up first. However, with the economy the way it is and the value of credit card numbers going up, it's important to properly destroy a credit card.
There are two crucial parts of a credit card -- information embossed on the front of the card and the information encoded in the magnetic stripe on the back of the card. Not surprisingly, both locations contain the same information, which is merely displayed differently to the typical "reader." When you want to destroy a card, it's important to destroy both sources of information, and this article will explain how.
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Posted
Apr 29 2009, 08:52 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner site ConsumerAffairs.com.
It didn't take scammers long to latch on to the latest hot-button topic to try to make a quick buck. Scams built on fears of swine flu are proliferating quickly across the Internet.
The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued an alert this week warning of a number of e-mail scams related to the swine flu. The attacks arrive via an unsolicited e-mail message typically containing a subject line related to the swine flu.
"These e-mail messages may contain a link or an attachment. If users click on this link or open the attachment, they may be directed to a phishing Web site or exposed to malicious code," the alert said.
US-CERT encourages users to take the following measures to protect themselves:
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Posted
Mar 20 2009, 11:33 AM
by
Karen Datko
Money Blog: Smart Spending Blog - MSN Money
This post comes from partner site ConsumerAffairs.com.
While identity theft is a growing problem, services that offer to protect consumers from this menace may not be the answer, according to a new report by the Consumer Federation of America.
Capitalizing on the anxiety surrounding identity theft, dozens of services have sprung up, claiming to protect consumers' identity for fees that can add up to hundreds of dollars a year. But when CFA studied the Web sites of 16 for-profit identity-theft services, it found that the descriptions of how they help consumers are often confusing, unclear and ambiguous.
Furthermore, these services may not always offer the protection that consumers are led to believe they will get, the group says.
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