Articles and Ideas October, 2008
When you swipe your credit or debit card at a major retailer, you expect it to be a safe transaction, right? WRONG. Big companies and businesses are highly unconcerned about the safety of your credit information. Even the government seems surprisingly lax when it comes to protecting your information.
The public sat up and paid attention when a recent investigation in Miami uncovered a 11 person identity theft ring with international influence that targeted customers of large chain stores and stole millions of credit card numbers. Another ring admitted to using random entry of numbers into a municipal court site to ...
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An alarming amount of homeowners are facing foreclosure, and more so this year than in years past, will be filing bankruptcy. Unable to buy a new home until their credit has been rebuilt, these families have been flooding the rental market. Property management companies are seeing an increase in applicants. These new renters, though, aren't eligible to rent a home through many property management companies. Designed to protect landlords by screening new applicants, and tenants by ensuring that repairs are made in a timely manner, a person with a current foreclosure or new bankruptcy is a ...
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You’ve heard this phish story before: a friend or associate received an e-mail from a reputable bank or credit card company. Warned that her credit status was in danger, she was directed to a link where she was able to supply her information in order to “verify” her credit status. Two weeks later, her bank account was empty and her credit score had plummeted.
It had all seemed so legitimate, right down to the design of the web page and logo of the faux “company”. And your friend is only one of millions who get taken in by phishing each year.
Now ...
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Plenty of people wardrive. Cruising around looking for wireless network locations isn’t illegal - but hacking into the network to access sensitive information is. ‘Sniffers’ are illegal programs that can be installed in hacked wireless networks, and used to download information like customers credit card numbers and other personal information.
The Renagade Wardrivers
An international identity theft ring was discovered operating out of Miami in August, that was credited with the theft of over 40 million credit and debit card numbers. This is the largest credit card and identity theft scheme yet, with 11 people from the US, Ukraine, Estonia ...
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Late last month, President Bush signed a new identity theft law in an attempt to help the increasing numbers of victims affected by this insidious crime. Previously, the requirements to be met to allow prosecution of cyber-crime were so high as to allow many hackers to slip through the cracks.
Felony Charges May Now Apply
Identity theft is the number one offense associated with computer based crimes, and usually involves some sort of computer based fraud, unauthorized access or tampering, or even hacking into government or state owned computer systems. The new law makes many of these acts a felony.
In ...
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This article is not directly related to ID theft, but the prevention of fraud is very similar to that of ID theft and should be beneficial to the majority of you
The Consumer Federation of America, one of the country's biggest consumer watchdog groups, released a warning recently: the more desperate you are financially, the more vulnerable you are to the predations of unscrupulous white-collar criminals. These are scammers who wont' hesitate to turn your worry to their cruel advantage. Thus, in the wake of the past year's economic troubles, more and more Americans are potential victims of fraud.
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Last year, 8.4 million people across the U.S. were victims of identity theft. Amounting to more than $49 billion in lost funds, identity theft in 2007 was a lucrative business for criminals in the know.
But the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC) says it doesn’t have to be that way. The organization is spearheading National Protect Your Identity Week Oct. 19-25 in order to educate citizens on how to protect their accounts, their funds and their identity.
Sponsored by such well-known organizations as the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), National Protect Your Identity Week will include tips, ...
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One of the most supreme tools that can put the brakes on identity theft is a good paper shredder. Though this might not cross the mind of many as an essential tool, there is a reason why so many financial security experts strongly recommend them not only to individuals but to businesses as well.
For the most part, once an individual throws out his or her trash, there is no legal recourse to it and there can be no expectation of privacy. This means anyone is free to go through a person's trash once it is in a public area waiting for disposal. As unsettling as rifling through trash may sound, it is one of the top methods by which identity thieves get their hands on prized information.
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One of the newer forms of identity theft is known as medical identity theft. As commonly associated with this type of fraud, medical identity theft occurs when an individual uses somebody's personal information to obtain costly medical treatments. The number of ways an individual can end up with the personal information of another varies; however, medical fraudsters end up with their hands on the medical insurance numbers of their victims as well. This poses a number of dangers. While it is inconvenient to be left with large medical bills, the fraudster's medical history becomes entwined with their victim's. This can leave the potential for deadly mistreatment were a victim to receive the wrong type of blood for a transfusion or a drug that he or she is allergic to.
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Identity theft is not a concern only for the rich, the poor, or the elderly. It strikes all types of people, in many different places, and in many walks of life. The thieves are not always the people that you’d suspect, either, as has been proven by the case of the mother-daughter team of Cynthia Jean Walker and Cassidy Janosky in Washington State.
The duo was discovered when an alert resident tipped off the local police that a credit card had been opened in their name—and they knew absolutely knew nothing about it. A local detective was able to put a ...
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