Tag: IDENTITY THEFT

Phishing scams involving hijacked accounts and the dissemination of phony links have recently appeared on Facebook and Twitter, but now that strategy is returning -- albeit in a creepy new way -- to its old stomping grounds: e-mail. A group of Net grifters has been breaking into browser-based e-mail accounts (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, or AOL Mail), and sending dubious messages to everyone in the ...

Facebook has had its share of privacy and security issues, but a pair of professed Facebook fans at FBHive have recently found an easily exploitable hole that can reveal private information, even if the privacy settings are set to hide it. Thankfully, the folks at FBHive have not made public the details of the hole, which can allegedly reveal your hometown, relationship status, political views, ...

Imagine if the the characters in 'Oliver Twist' had access to the Internet and other high-tech equipment. Fagin's band of orphaned pickpockets wouldn't have stopped at just snatching wallets; they would have used the stolen credit cards to commit fraud, and the driver's licenses to steal identities. Well, according to FOX News, a Chicago-based group calling itself 'Cannon to the Wiz' has been ...

A man used hacking software to steal more than $100,000 from banking and brokerage accounts over a six-month period in 2007, according to Macworld. Alexey Mineev recently plead guilty to one count of money laundering in U.S. District Court. Mineev stole account numbers and passwords from users with a Trojan horse, which can pose as anything from a security patch to a screensaver. Then, he wired ...

We've already expressed our distaste for Facebook quizzes; we're just plain tired of our Facebook accounts being bombarded with requests to 'Find Out How Well You Know Your Town' or 'What 1980s Film Character Do You Most Resemble.' After reading this story at WCPO.com, we can add one more entry to the list of reasons we would like to see these applications disappear; phishers are now using ...

If things continue at this pace, we may never use an ATM again. Stealing money from other people's accounts using information garnered from an ATM is nothing new. We've seen hackers grabbing data as it's transferred from the ATM to the bank's servers. We've even seen the first use of ATM card skimmers, which collect information as customers swipe their cards. While those schemes require a certain ...

When you talk about "classy", it's hard not to bring up Port Richey, Florida resident Brett Becker, who was recently profiled on TampaBay.com. One day back in 2006, Mr. Becker found that some of his neighbor's mail had accidentally arrived in his mailbox. But rather than return the mail to his 86-year-old female neighbor (and the mail's rightful recipient), Becker allegedly used her identity to ...

With phishing scams sweeping across the Net, including recent Facebook and Twitter attacks, it's important to take extra measures in protecting personal information from identity thieves. One method of avoiding phishing traps and hackers is to ensure that your passwords are virtually undetectable. Riva Richmond, in the New York Times, outlines some easy and effective ways to secure passwords ...

New Yorkers are once again the victims of an ATM-rigging spree that managed to steal more than $500,000 from hundreds of Staten Island residents. According to the Daily News, the thieves attached skimmers on card slots in ATMs at Sovereign Bank branches in the New York City borough. In addition to the scanned data, the criminals hid tiny cameras in the lighted ATM signs and used the cameras to ...

On April 30th, an unidentified individual, or group, hacked into the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program's Web site, WikiLeaks first reported Sunday. A full week after the hack occurred, the perpetrator is still holding hostage the private data of over 8 million Virginia patients. The party responsible for this security breach didn't hack into the prescription-drug-abuse-tracking site for ...

The notion of hackers as lonely, overweight tech-geeks who reside in their parents' basement is now an antiquated, and false, stereotype, according to a recent story on cybercrime from The Washington Post. Bryan Sartin of Verizon Business, a firm that investigates data breaches, told the Post that his group investigated 100 incidents involving 285 million compromised consumer records in 2008. ...

While few businesses have made it through the current financial crisis unscathed, certain "entrepreneurs" continue to be successful: scam artists and con men. It can be difficult to stay abreast of such crooks' rapidly changing ploys, such as the recent phishing scam that promised expedited government stimulus checks, so we all need to exercise extreme caution whenever we are asked for personal ...

When consultant jobs are few and far between, you have to make the most out of the ones you can get. Take, for instance, Zeldon Morris. When the Family First Credit Union in Orem, Utah hired the Provo man to fix some bugs in a recent computer upgrade, Morris decided to take some liberties with a few of the accounts, according to Provo's Daily Herald. According to recently submitted court ...

ATM card skimmers. We knew they were a terrifying technical possibility, but, until now, no one had ever found one in the wild. That is until a reader, known as Dan, e-mailed The Consumerist with the photo above and a tale about a suspicious-looking ATM at his local Washington Mutual branch. Dan noticed that something was a little off. The card slot didn't seem to be completely attached to the ...

Ah, yes. It was about this time last year when we were looking at an FBI report indicating that 2007 was the worst year on record for Internet fraud. Crime was up 25-percent from 2006, and we sure thought it couldn't get any worse. Sadly, it sure did -- 33-percent worse, to be specific. Yes, the 2008 report has been released by the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3. The report ...