Financial Identity theft is the bank fraud. It occurs when criminal gets a loan from bank pretending himself someone else. The criminal proves himself to be the victim by showing an accurate name, address, date of birth or other information that are required by the banks to identify the customer. Even if the lender verifies this information through national consumer reporting agency all information given by criminal is identical and not a single issue arises at this stage. It can only be verify by checking Original ID card issued by Government. Such crimes do not leave any evidence. One can only discover the criminal if the funds for loan were mailed to them.
Financial identity theft include bank fraud, credit card fraud, computer and telecommunication fraud, social program fraud, tax refund fraud, mail fraud etc. Financial Identity theft is the most occurring financial crimes all the financial crimes.
Financial Identity thieves look for basic information like name, address and social security number additionally they look for credit card number, your bank information, any legal document information, any titles related to your home and property that can be utilized to refinance your existing property and help to take on bigger loans to make you a victim of mortgage fraud.
Whenever any one makes debit or credit card transaction at any retailer, it is retailer’s responsibility to protect your information. M
Read more…
Once a victim’s debit card number has been successfully skimmed, the card can be cloned, say, 100 times, and the cloned cards can be distributed to 100 people. All 100 people can then use the cloned cards to withdraw cash from 100 different ATMs within a brief window of five or ten minutes. If 100 people withdraw $200 each from the same account, at the same time, the scam nets $20,000 in almost no time.
Your credit or debit card number can be skimmed in a number of different ways:
Wedge Skimming: The most common type of skimming occurs when a salesperson or waiter takes your credit or debit card and runs it through a card reader, which copies the information contained in the card’s magnetic stripe. Once the thief has obtained the credit or debit card data, he can then burn the card number to a blank card, or simply use the number to make purchases online or over the phone.
POS Swaps: Many people pay for goods or services by swiping a credit or debit card through the in-store point of sale machines. EFTPOS (electronic funds transfers at the point of sale) skimming occurs when the point of sale terminal has been replaced with a skimming device. In
Read more…
I’m sure you know that the people of Haiti experienced a devastating earthquake. It’s also likely that you donated money to a charitable cause to try to help them with rescue and recovery efforts. What you may not know is that some who tried to donate just like you may have done instead gave money and personal information to charity scammers.
Charity scammers are people who count on tragedies as their bread and butter. When disaster strikes, they aren’t sad or sympathetic, but happy. That’s because when people give en masse, as they do in incredible times of need, it’s easier to get people to fall for their schemes. People are rushing to get aid where it has to go, so they don’t take too much time to research the organizations they are funding. Bad idea.
Some of the organizations people give money to aren’t organizations at all, but instead fake charities that are actually put together by identity thieves. Sometimes the thieves will create a fraudulent website that is optimized to come up first in search engines when people look for terms such as, referring to the earlier example, “Haiti earthquake help.” When people click on the link to the thief’s site, they may find that it has malware running on it that the criminal can now run on their machine. Better yet, for the
Read more…
Most major websites now install cookies on your computer, which track what you do online. Over time, these cookies develop a profile, which becomes your digital fingerprint, to a certain extent. You may have noticed after searching for a specific product, advertisements for that particular product or brand appearing on various other websites you visit.
The New York Times reports , “advertisers are increasingly using powerful software known as supercookies, such as so-called Flash and document object management (or DOM) cookies, which can hold more information, and Web bugs or beacons, which let sites record statistics like what ads attracted you to the site and whether you bought something. They are not removed when you clear out your cookies.”
The “harm” done here is less damaging than it is invasive. Meaning I don’t see any physical harm or identity theft ever happening as a result of this refined marketing. More so, it is very intrusive to some peoples web surfing habits and the collecting of this type of information will continually define what we are presented when we travel to different websites.
With numerous privacy watchdogs taking this kind of advertising offensively, and the Obama administration now stepping in, we will surely see standards in this kind of marketing practice appear over the next few years.
The NYT post HERE provides a litany of resources to combat supercookies. Another gr
Read more…
When your own identity is threatened because of the fact that someone else is actually using it without your permission for some ulterior motives, what you are facing is an identity theft. Identity theft is defined as an offense concerning unlawful handling of another individual’s identity. Hence in order to protect yourself from such illegal practices and save you from its untoward consequences you invariably need to find apt identity theft solution.
There are basically four types of identity theft known to jeopardize people’s lives. They are:
- Financial Identity Theft (exploiting another’s name and SSN to obtain goods and services)
- Criminal Identity Theft (pretending as another person when arrested for a crime)
- Identity Cloning (using another’s information to assume his or her identity in daily life)
- Business/Commercial Identity Theft (using another’s business name to obtain credit)
Accordingly there are different approaches to the identity theft solutions for each of the above types of identity thefts.
Identity theft is considered to be a serious breach of privacy. Hence the need for proper and effective identity theft solution has become very crucial. The raise
Read more…
InformationWeek reports, “All the major sites–Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn–have the same minimum password length of six characters. And password complexity checks are few and far between. Facebook and LinkedIn have no complexity checks. For MySpace, some complexity checking is enabled; however, users can enter a password of ‘123456.’ Twitter has a basic complexity check based on a static word list that’s viewable through the HTML source of the login page. You can’t use ‘password1,’ but ‘1password’ is OK.”
Of the 32 million people whose passwords were exposed, almost 1% had chosen “123456.” The next most popular password was “12345.” “Princess,” “qwerty,” and “abc123” were other common choices.
In another instance, phishers posted thousands of Hotmail addresses and the associated passwords in an online forum. These passwords were equally obvious. Those used most frequently included “111111,” “123456,” “1234567,” “12345678,” and “123456789.” Many of the phishing victims used people’s first names as passwords, most likely the names of their kids, spouses, and so on. 60% of the exposed passwords contained either all numbers or all
Read more…