ATM skimming, the top ATM-related crime, accounts for about $350,000 in fraud every day in the United States, exceeding a billion dollars a year. An organization called EAST, or European ATM Security Team, posted seized video footage from a compromised ATM, depicting the installation of a camera and skimmer. The video shows how criminals collect cardholders’ PINs. …
Most of us tend to trust the person on the other end of the telephone more than we trust an email in our inbox. However telephone scams continue to plague people and successfully empty the victims bank accounts. Caller ID spoofing occurs when your phone rings and your caller ID displays a name and number…
Stalking is about domination. It is one or more persons continually making efforts to control another person’s life and thoughts by paying unwanted attention. Stalking is when someone contacts you when you repeatedly request that they do not. They watch, follow, call, email, text, fax or continually send mail to you after you request they…
A botnet is a group of Internet-connected personal computers that have been infected by a malicious application, which allows a hacker to control the infected computers without alerting the computer owners. Since the infected PCs are controlled remotely by a single hacker, they are known as bots, robots, or zombies. Consumers’ and small businesses’ lax…
Crime and violence are generally not fun topics to write about or read about. Discussing a bloody home invasion isn’t exactly inspiring, nor does it make good dinner time chat. Events like these are only “entertaining” when fictionalized in TV and movies and make for a gripping arms length “who dunnit”. However the fact is…
“Spear phishing” refers to phishing scams that are directed at a specific target. Like when Tom Hanks was stranded on the island in the movie Cast Away. He whittled a spear and targeted specific fish, rather than dropping a line with bait and catching whatever came by. When phishing attacks are directed at company officers…
#1 Nigerian Scams: According to a Dutch study, victims of advanced-fee scams, which are also known as 419 scams or Nigerian scams, lost more than $9 billion in 2009, almost 50% more than the previous year. (This PDF contains the statistics from the study.) While these types of scams are generally understood to be Nigerian…
What’s the point in even knowing what the most 25 dangerous neighborhoods are? For one thing, if you live in one, you may already have a sense of it, but it would be good to know you’re considered high risk and might want to take the extra precautions and batten down the hatches. Plus for…
#1 Publically available information is not valuable to an identity thief. If I was an identity thief I’d start with the phone book. All information about you is of value to an identity thief. The bad guy gathers as much intelligence about you as possible. Once they get enough data to become you they are…
#1 You can’t protect yourself from identity theft. Some, not all Identity theft is preventable. There are many things people can do to minimize their risk, both online and offline. Shred anything that has names and account numbers or any other data that can be used to con someone else into divulging even more information.…
