Who is responsible for financial losses due to fraud? The bank, or the customers whose accounts have been drained? One Michigan judge recently decided in favor of Comerica Bank customers, holding the bank responsible for approximately $560,000 out of a total of nearly $2 million in unrecovered losses. A copy of the bench decision is available from Pierce Atwood…
We are increasingly reliant on online calendars and address books, but when you store everything in the cloud, there is the possibility that your essential data could evaporate. Some insist that you have nothing to worry about but what if you got hacked and all your data was deleted? What if you temporarily lost Internet…
I’m a little more than a casual online shopper, so I make lots of electronic payments. I prefer to avoid stores, so I buy almost everything aside from food via the Internet. I frequently use eBay. I’m also something of an airline mileage fanatic, so I prefer to pay with a credit card that earns…
Has your computer ever refused to turn on when you hit the power button? Or maybe it turned on, but only to display a blue screen? The best (really the worst) is when you’ve been working on a document or presentation all day, and your hard drive crashes. If this has yet to happen to…
The most basic advice for protecting your own identity is to protect your Social Security number. The obvious solution is simply never to disclose your number, but this is silly, since, depending on your age, you have probably provided it to hundreds of people, on hundreds of forms. It now sits in hundreds of databases,…
Identity theft victims don’t need Jessica Van Vliet, an assistant professor in counseling psychology at the University of Alberta, to tell them that they no longer feel safe when conducting everyday financial transactions, which most of us take for granted. But she did a study highlighting a fact that many of us in the industry…
Back 30-35 years ago there were house break-ins like there are today, but home security systems were scarce and people weren’t all that concerned either. A lot has changed. When I was in elementary school, my parents would let us walk to school, walk home, play outside all day and my mother or father would…
When traveling, people are generally nice, kind and generally trustworthy. However there are ALWAYS predators waiting in the wings to pounce when you totally let your guard down. The best defense is a good offense. So keep your head up, pay attention and if it’s too good to be true it is. Fake Cops: I…
FedEx showed up to my house with a good-sized box, and the driver came to my door to request my signature and a little help. The box felt like it weighed 90 pounds, maybe slightly more. It wasn’t too heavy for two adults. A little awkward, but handling it was easy enough. A safe should…
Cyber scams happen to the young and the old, the rich and the poor. It doesn’t matter how good or bad your credit is, or whether or not you have a credit card. Cybercriminals target everyone, regardless of how much or how little you rely on a computer. The lowest of the lowlifes, however, tend…
