Bad Credit Blog

Thursday, October 09, 2008

From Fox News

PORTLAND, Ore.  -  When identity theft suspect Christina Herrera was arrested, she didn’t have to wait long to tell her husband. He was in the next holding cell.

Herrera and Jason Keno were arrested a half-hour apart, and the coincidence helped police and prosecutors link what had appeared to be separate identity theft investigations.

“It was kind of like crook karma that they’re both picked up within a half-hour of each other, and we found evidence on each that tied the cases together,” Portland Officer Barbara Glass told The Oregonian newspaper. “We’re not surprised, never; but we’re entertained, always.”

A Multnomah County grand jury last week indicted the couple on charges of fraud and aggravated identity theft. Herrera, 36, and Keno, 29, pleaded not guilty.

Police said the investigation began at 11:34 a.m. June 12, when an officer stopped a motorist for failing to use his turn signal. The driver of the rental car presented an Oregon driver’s license for Brandon Dean.

“That isn’t you,” Officer Michael Strawn said. The driver explained that he’d lost a lot of weight because of heavy drug use.

Strawn took him into custody and Glass, an identity theft investigator, got involved. While Strawn ran fingerprints to identify the driver as Jason Keno, Glass called the rental-car company and learned the vehicle had been rented with a MasterCard in the name of Sabrina Joy.

About noon that same day, officers went to a house on a tip that they’d find Herrera, who was wanted on a warrant for forgery. Glass, who knew Herrera from past cases, heard of the arrest on the police radio and asked officers to bring her by. Police found other people’s account information in Herrera’s purse and a credit card in Sabrina Joy’s name.

When police searched the rental car, they found a June 10 room reservation receipt at the Ramada Inn under Brandon Dean’s name, the same name on the driver’s license Keno had shown police when he was stopped.

Check-out was June 12.

Glass’ partner, Officer Dave Staab, called the motel. The room hadn’t been cleaned yet, so he raced over to search it. He found evidence of counterfeit Oregon licenses and stolen personal and business checks. Some of the personal information matched names and numbers found in Herrera’s purse, police records show.

The couple are accused of renting the car in Joy’s name, paying cash to rent a room at a Ramada Inn in another person’s name, and then traveling around the Portland area using forged and stolen checks.

Kevin Demer, a deputy district attorney, said the grand jury “laughed out loud” when they heard the case.

“They could not believe the circumstances and the luck of things coming together that way.”

For the complete story: http://foxnews.com/story/0,2933,435321,00.html

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If you know someone struggling to quit smoking we found a great site that offers genuine  help. You can Quit!!

 Please visit Kathy Kearney’s website for some wonderful Christian articles, short stories, plays, family stories, Bible studies etc. Check it out.

A lot of articles have been written about identity theft that I fear another one may just go over your head. This one was reported by Fox news this past Spring. Everyone with one and half sense, as my father used to say, knows the danger is real but everyone believes it can’t happen to them. Well it can and you could be the next victim unless you protect yourself. We recommend LifeLock for Identity Theft protection because that’s what we use ourselves. We have investigated them all and they are the best!

Well that is exactly what Simon Bunce of Hampshire, England thought until it actually happened to him. Mr. Bunce not only had his credit-card number stolen online but was arrested and falsely accused of being a pedophile when that card number was used to buy child pornography.

The story has a somewhat happy ending, as Bunce eventually was fully cleared by police but not without lots of pain and suffering .

He was finally cleared but that only came after he’d lost his $250,000-a-year job, his father and siblings stopped talking to him and his computer was taken away for several months, the BBC reports.

Bunce had the misfortune of being caught up in Operation Ore, a massive British online kiddie-porn crackdown in 2003 that itself grew out of Operation Avalanche, an earlier American bust which began with a 1999 raid on Landslide Productions, a Texas mom-and-pop operation that handled credit-card transactions for porn Web sites.

• • Four Million Credit, Debit Cards Exposed in Data Breach

Most of Landslide Productions customers were perfectly legal, even if they are sleazy. But several were selling child pornography, and American authorities handed over a list of British credit-card numbers allegedly used to buy such stuff to their colleagues across the pond.

However, whereas the Americans used the names to cajole U.S. customers to buy more kiddie porn and then arrested them, the Brits put the cart before the horse and in early 2002 began simply rounding up everyone in the U.K. - about 7,200 people - whose card numbers showed up on the list.

Among them were rock star Pete Townshend of the Who, Robert del Naja of ’90s trip-hop band Massive Attack - and, in 2004, Simon Bunce.

Bunce was arrested “on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children, downloading indecent images of children and incitement to distribute indecent images of children” - all before a single image of such had been found on his computers at home and at work.

He quickly found himself unemployed and estranged from his family. But his wife stuck by him, and while his computer sat in police custody waiting to be examined, Bunce took action.

“I knew there’d been a fundamental mistake made and so I had to investigate it,” he said.

Bunce used the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and a catalog of Internet Protocol addresses to establish that his credit-card number had been used in Jakarta, Indonesia, to buy child pornography online at the same moment he used the card to pay the bill at a London restaurant.

He also found that his card number had been stolen from a popular online-retail site, though he wouldn’t say which one.

Finally, after several months, the police admitted what Bunce already had proven - he was innocent, and there was no evidence of child pornography on his computer.

He finally got another job - selling computer-security services.

I wouldn’t put it off another day. Contact LifeLock now. They give you a one million dollar guarantee that you won’t be a victim! How’s that for a guarantee?

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Please visit our website for all the rest of credit help available! Thank you!

For the rest of the story go here:

www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,346577,00.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7326736.stm     

Our office received the following memorandum this morning from a major news source that we subscribe to.  They recommended that we pass it along to everyone who reads our blog.

As you read the following remember… this basic rule always applies: Do NOT give any personal information over the phone if you did not at least initiate the call.

Jury Duty Scam
This has been verified by the FBI (their link is also included below). Please pass this on to everyone in your email address book. It is spreading fast so be prepared should you get this call.

Most of us take those summonses for jury duty seriously, but enough people skip out on their civic duty, that a new and ominous kind of fraud has surfaced.

The caller claims to be a jury coordinator. If you protest that you never received a summons for jury duty, the scammer asks you for your Social Security number and date of birth so he or she can verify the information and cancel the arrest warrant. Give out any of this information and bingo; your identity was just stolen.

The fraud has been reported so far in 11 states, including Oklahoma , Illinois , and Colorado . This (swindle) is particularly insidious because they use intimidation over the phone to try to bully people into giving information by pretending they are with the court system. The FBI and the federal court system have issued nationwide alerts on their web sites, warning consumers about the fraud.

Now aside from the obvious what can you do should you get one of these calls? If you are a member of LifeLock, you can relax because your identification is well protected. No one can steal it, and that is backed up with a million dollar guarantee.

Here is what LifeLock Offers You For Only $10 per Month!

• Proactive Identity Theft Protection
• Reduce Junk Mail
• Reduce Credit Card Offers
• $1 Million Service Guarantee

If ever you lose your wallet (or it’s stolen), just give them a call. They will transfer you to a certified Recovery Specialist that will help you:

• Identify your missing documents
• Contact each credit, bank or document issuing company while you’re on the phone
• Cancel the lost cards, licenses and documents (including your credit/debit cards, driver’s licenses, social security cards, insurance cards, passports, checkbooks and travelers checks*)
• Fill out the paperwork and request new replacements
• Initiate the fraud affidavit and police reports if the wallet was stolen
• Depending on the severity of the situation, additional follow-up and resolution calls will be arranged.

In many cases, they will be able to replace all of your documents for you. *However, some states require you to be involved with us directly. If this happens, we’ll make it as easy as possible by filling out the necessary forms ahead of time and setting appointments at your convenience - all you have to do is show up.

Think about it. If identity theft is so rampant that the FBI is posting articles about it, why have you NOT signed up for LifeLock yet? Don’t think because you have bad credit nobody will want your identity! Bad or good credit someone can still set up bank accounts and get credit cards in your name. And after they ruin your credit you’ll be stuck trying to fix the mess!

Source:

http://www.fbi.gov/page2/june06/jury_scams060206.htm

For more credit help, please visit our site. We have been there and know how bad credit can affect everything, including your health. Take a look!

If you know someone struggling to quit smoking we found a great site that offers genuine  help. You can Quit!!

Here is a great site for some wonderful Spiritual articles, short stories, plays, family stories, Bible studies etc. Check it out.

Came across this article today in the Washington Post online. Now, keep in mind that for just about .30 cents a day you can protect your identity – with a million dollar guarantee that it won’t be stolen – with Lifelock. And please tell us if you seriously think it’s not worth the money! Read on . . .

Justice Breyer Is Among Victims in Data Breach Caused by File Sharing

By Brian Krebs
washingtonPost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 9, 2008; A01

Sometime late last year, an employee of a McLean investment firm decided to trade some music, or maybe a movie, with like-minded users of the online file-sharing network LimeWire while using a company computer. In doing so, he inadvertently opened the private files of his firm, Wagner Resource Group, to the public.

That exposed the names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of about 2,000 of the firm’s clients, including a number of high-powered lawyers and Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer.

The breach was not discovered for nearly six months. A reader of washingtonpost.com’s Security Fix blog found the information while searching LimeWire in June.

Services such as LimeWire, which are known as peer-to-peer networks, link computers directly, allowing users to swap digital movies, music and files with other users without the need of a central Web site to manage the exchange.

What users may not be aware of is that the software that facilitates file sharing may be configured to allow access to a portion, if not all, of a user’s documents.

Robert Boback, chief executive of Tiversa, the company hired by Wagner to help contain the data breach, said such breaches are hardly rare. About 40 to 60 percent of all data leaks take place outside of a company’s secured network, usually as a result of employees or contractors installing file-sharing software on company computers.

“We’ve seen a lot of instances where a company will be working on a product that’s not even released yet, and the diagrams for that product are already out on the Net,” Boback said. “This case is unique because of the high profile of the targets. The individuals on this list are at a very high risk, almost imminent, of identity theft.”

In June, medical records and Social Security numbers for at least 1,000 patients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center were exposed in a peer-to-peer data breach. In June 2007, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer disclosed that an employee who installed peer-to-peer software on a company laptop exposed files containing the names, Social Security numbers, addresses and some compensation information of 17,000 current and former Pfizer employees.

In March, a Seattle man was sentenced to 51 months in prison for using LimeWire and similar networks to dig up personal and financial information on more than 50 people, which he then used to open lines of credit in the victims’ names.

Tiversa officials found that more than a dozen LimeWire users in places as far away as Sri Lanka and Colombia downloaded the list of personal data from the Wagner network.

“To me, this was devastating,” said Phylyp Wagner, founder of the investment firm. “I didn’t even know what peer-to-peer was. I do now.”

A spokesman for Breyer said the justice had no comment on the security breach, which came to light after the reader notified Security Fix and the blog alerted some of the Wagner clients.

Wagner said his company has contracted with FirstAdvantage of Poway, Calif., which last week sent out letters notifying affected clients of the breach and offering each six months of free credit-report monitoring. He emphasized that the peer-to-peer disclosure never endangered his clients’ financial records, which are stored by a separate company. But that may be small consolation to several lawyers on the list who said they recently experienced unexplained financial activity.

“This may explain why two weeks ago I got a $9,000 cellphone bill from AT&T,” said Steven Agresta, a partner with the law firm Alston & Bird. Someone had opened a phone account using his date of birth and Social Security number, but with a different address.

Agresta said AT&T promptly canceled the account and the bogus charges, but he’s still checking his credit history and other accounts for signs of fraud.

Of the 2,000 records from Wagner Resource Group that were found online, 700 included Social Security numbers, names and birth dates, while other records included only one or two of those details.

Frank Cabri, vice president of product management for FaceTime Communications, a Belmont, Calif., company that helps organizations control employee use of peer-to-peer networks and other applications, said there are more than 120 free software titles available for online file-sharing.

“Some of these applications are more complicated than others in terms of helping users figure out what files and folders they want to share and expose, and a lot of times the user is so focused on just going after that latest MP3 file that they’re not paying attention to the default settings that come with the application,” Cabri said.

Brian Krebs writes the Security Fix blog, at http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix.

Now. If after reading all this you aren’t convinced that you MUST protect your credit, we can’t help you. But if you understand how widespread Identity Theft is getting, and how easy it is for people to gain access to your personal information, then I know you’ll contact Lifelock and sign up today.

For more credit help, please visit our site. We have been there and know how bad credit can affect everything, including your health. Take a look!

If you know someone struggling to quit smoking we found a great site that offers genuine  help. You can Quit!!

Here is a great site for some wonderful Spiritual articles, short stories, plays, family stories, Bible studies etc. Check it out.

Dateline June 9th, 2008 - FoxNews.com reports that over 11,000 University of Florida students had their Social Security numbers posted online. They had been posted on the Internet for over a year and it was only discovered “accidentally.” The University has notified everyone except 570 former students that they can’t find. Bummer - what if you were one of those?

Just a few months back it was widely reported that NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg had his identity stolen. It was reported that two men stole money from the Mayor, the first for $10,000 and the second for over $400,000. I believe that if the second party had not been so greedy he would have gotten away with it. Due to the size of the stolen checks the bank put a hold on them till they could be verified. Both were caught but many times they are not.

Can something like this happen to you ? The answer is YES! Can you prevent it from happening? YES!! You must protect yourself. Don’t depend on the government to do it - it won’t happen!

Waiting until it happens could be a potential mess for you! With your social security number and birthday you can have all the money stolen from your bank account. Credit cards issued in your name (and on your credit report), and even PROPERTY purchased in your name! A customer of my daughter’s at the car dealership where she worked had her identity stolen and the person actually BOUGHT A HOUSE with it! Try cleaning that mess up!

Our site offers two Cadillac of companies so you won’t become the next victim. LifeLock is the originator of identity protection. And they back it up with a million dollar guarantee. You won’t do better than that! We were going to tell you about all the things LifeLock does for you, but it’s really so much that it’s easier just to send you to their site to read it for yourself. My daughter and I both use their service.

We also highly recommend ConsumerDirect. ConsumerDirect members can reduce the interest rate on credit cards they already have, declare and recover from Identity Theft, negotiate debt settlements, dispute billing errors, manage privacy options and much, much more. And all without writing any letters or making any phone calls. Their service also enables members to improve their credit score by fixing credit report errors online. Just click what needs to be fixed and ConsumerDirect does all the work! Additionally ConsumerDirect will put a credit lock on your file so no one can apply without your consent.

Having bad credit is problematic enough without it getting ruined further through identity theft! Don’t let it happen to you. For around $10 to $15 a month you can protect yourself. It’s worth the money. Don’t delay! I’m sure that right now there’s about 10,000 University of Florida alumni scrambling to see if they have become victims of identity theft and wishing they had signed up for services like LifeLock or ConsumerDirect BEFORE their identities were published on the internet.

For more credit help, please visit our site. We have been there and know how bad credit can affect everything, including your health. Take a look!

If you know someone struggling to quit smoking we found a great site that offers genuine  help. You can Quit!!

Here is a great site for some wonderful Spiritual articles, short stories, plays, family stories, Bible studies etc. Check it out.

The IRS recently published its “Dirty Dozen,” a list of the top tax scams. Some of them are used to con taxpayers like you, while others are employed to con the IRS itself.Memorable movie characters like Danny Ocean, Lilly Dillon, and Thomas Crown, glamorize the art of the heist. Real life proves, however, that crime is a lot grittier than these smooth-talking, martini-drinking characters reveal. According to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the real-world tax scammer actually spends his time writing phony emails, and clinging to childish misinterpretations of tax laws. Every year, the IRS publishes a list of the most flagrant tax scams. This year’s entries include scams that target unsuspecting taxpayers, as well as scams used to get out of paying taxes to Uncle Sam. Here’s a snapshot of the top three:

Phishing

The phishing con runs like this: The bad guys send out official-looking emails that pose as IRS communications. From within the email, the taxpayer is directed to an official-looking website, and asked to supply personal information. Most likely, the email will make a soft threat about what happens if the individual fails to comply with the request. Unsuspecting taxpayers-unaware that someone would go to such lengths to impersonate the IRS-read the email and provide the requested information, which often are credit card , bank account, and Social Security numbers . The con artists record the information provided, and use it to steal the taxpayer’s identity , open up fraudulent credit accounts , and siphon money out of bank accounts. To avoid falling victim to such a scheme, never respond to an email that’s “from” the IRS. Since they don’t contact taxpayers via email, you don’t have to worry about any repercussions. Just forward the email to phishing@irs.gov and move on with your day.

Economic stimulus payment scam

Next on the list is a similar scam related to the Bush administration’s upcoming tax rebate. Con men posing as IRS officials contact taxpayers by phone or email regarding the tax rebate program. They claim that the taxpayer won’t receive a rebate check without verification of personal information.

This scam is also easy to avoid. Don’t provide bank account numbers or personal information to anyone who claims to be involved with the tax rebate or economic stimulus program. Again, contacting taxpayers in this manner is not IRS policy; the IRS will use the data from your 2007 tax return to send you your rebate check.

Weightless, invalid arguments

The IRS calls them frivolous arguments-a set of not-so-clever excuses employed to avoid paying taxes. These include things like “paying taxes is voluntary,” and “the First Amendment allows me to refuse paying taxes on religious grounds.” For more information on these arguments and why they’re invalid, visit www.irs.gov. There’s no glamour in trying to rip off taxpayers or the IRS. Scammers are better off putting their energies into their tax returns so that they don’t get hit with penalties and interest.

REF: MortgageLoans.com

BY: Catherine Brock

For more credit help, please visit our site. We have been there and know how bad credit can affect everything, including your health. Take a look!

If you know someone struggling to quit smoking we found a great site that offers genuine  help. You can Quit!!

Here is a great site for some wonderful Christian articles, short stories, plays, family stories, and  Bible studies by Kathy Kearney. Check it out.