When you hear that about 10 million Americans are victimized by identity theft each year, according to the Federal Trade Commission, you may wonder why the government isn’t doing anything to try and stop these crimes. However, the fact is that the government is trying. In fact, in the past few years, several bills have been made into law to help aid in prevention. The three biggest ones are as follows:
Identity Theft Assumption and Deterrence Act In 1998, the federal government took a huge step in the war against identity theft: making this crime a federal one when it involved activity between more than one state. Before this, it was pretty much up to the states to figure out the prosecution and punishment for themselves. As a result of this law, some sentencing guidelines were put into play, and thieves faced penalties of up to 30 years in jail – plus the option of getting consecutive sentences if they had multiple convictions.
Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act More commonly known as the CAN-SPAM ACT of 2003, this law was passed partially in an attempt to weed out individuals who send phishing attacks or other fraudulent emails. It Read more…
An excellent way to improve one’s level of security intelligence is to follow the writings of Robert X. Cringley, one of my favorite technology know-it-alls.
Anyway, Cringley’s credit card was recently hacked. And if his card can be hacked, anyone’s can. Like many cardholders, Cringley received a notification from his credit card company’s fraud depar
Today we have two random identity theft protection tips for you on pickpocketing and smishing, yes smishing.
1. Smishing People are always coming up with clever names to give to types of identity theft. First there was phishing, then there was vishing and now there is the newest incarnation: smishing. Smishing stands for phishing via SMS, or short message service, which you probably refer to as text messaging. With this scam, potential victims get a text message that instructs them to dial a toll-free phone number to solve a mishap with their financial institution. A lot of people will follow this instruction out of legitimate worry, and some will do the same simply out of curiosity.
When they do dial the number, they will find that it’s answered by a voice response system that instructs them to type in account information. After they type in the information, the thief’s system records the keystrokes. In that way, he or she is able to steal the person’s identity.
People tend to fall for this scam because they believe that if someone knows their cell phone number they must have some sort of a relationship with them. Accor
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Published: May 26, 2011Tags: Familial DNA, Grim Sleeper
Along with your neighborhood watch program and wireless home alarm system you should be comforted to know that there are technologies out there being put to use that help catch the bad guy.
Many of us by now know that a sample of Osama bin Laden’s DNA was used to effectively identify him. But how? They didn’t have his original DNA until his death, but they did have samples from bin Laden’s family members, and scientists were able to match them up and determine they had their man.
This is called Familial DNA.
In Las Angeles police captured a serial killer dubbed “Grim Sleeper”, based on pulling his sons DNA. Prior to the Grim Sleepers arrest, his son was arrested for an unrelated charge. From that arrest they pulled his DNA, and it was a partial match to the DNA found at the crime scenes of his father decades ago. This is called “familial DNA”, like father/son, mother/daughter or twins.
However the son was obviously much too young to commit the crimes that his father did in the 80’s, so detectives searched out his social network and on a hunch determined his father would more than likely be the closest match to the sons DNA. Based on where
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Sony estimates the massive data breach affecting 100 million PlayStation Network, Qriocity, and Sony Online Entertainment customers have cost $171 million so far. However, lawsuits and regulatory fines could push that figure much higher.
The money has been spent on providing identity theft protection to affected customers, costs from welcome back programs that offer services for free, customer support costs, network security enhancement costs, legal and consulting costs, as well as lost revenue, Sony said.
Sony stressed that it has not received “any confirmed reports of customer identity theft issues, nor any confirmed misuse of credit cards” from the data breaches.
The company acknowledged that class action lawsuits have been filed against the company and some of its subsidiaries and regulatory inquiries have been initiated. These could significantly increase the costs from the data breaches. “Those are all at a preliminary stage, so we are not able to include the possible outcome of any of them in our results forecast.”
Reed College’s entire website was recently copied and replicated, but with the fictitious name “University of Redwood.” The Wall Street Journal