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This post isn’t exactly a “how to” but if your current employment isn’t bringing in the bacon, I’m sure your criminal mind can figure it out. In the biggest digital advertising fraud in the history of the U.S., it was recently found that a group of hackers is bringing in from $3 million to $5 million a day from media companies and brands. That’s some scratch!

White Ops, an online fraud-prevention firm, uncovered this campaign, which they have called “Methbot,” and the firm found that the campaign

Top Bank Fraud Expert: ALL of the Big Banks’ Profits Come from FRAUD

Source:

Washington's Blog

22 September 2016

The country’s top white collar crime expert, William Black – who put over 1,000 top S&L executives in jail for fraud, and is a professor of law and economics at the University of Missouri – confirmed recently what the alternative media has been saying for years: the business plan of Wall Street is fraud. That’s their key profit center.

Black also says that a British parliamentary investiga

Many years ago when you were on vacation, before Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were invented (assuming you were an adult then), you had a great time, right? You weren’t “connected,” because there was no social media to be connected with.

If today you can’t imagine being disconnected from social media while on vacation, ask yourself how this can be, if years ago, you never missed what had not yet been invented.

And what about constantly checking e-mail while on vacation? Or constantly perusing va

You’d think with all the media attention regarding data breaches, hackers and identity theft, that consumers would be more focused on their privacy and how to protect their information from prying eyes. Surprisingly, almost 70% of the people are clueless about how a criminal might have got a hold of their personal information.

We all have a lot going on in our lives, and this is exactly how identity thieves like us. Ever lurking, these criminals are counting on us being too busy to give any thoug

A ransomware attack is when your computer gets locked down or your files become inaccessible, and you are informed that in order to regain use of your computer or to receive a cyber key to unlock your files, you must pay a ransom. Typically, cybercriminals request you pay them in bitcoins.

The attack begins when you’re lured, by a cybercriminal, into clicking a malicious link that downloads malware, such as CDT-Locker. Hackers are skilled at getting potential victims to click on these links, such

An impostor posed as Lorrie Cranor at a mobile phone store (in Ohio, nowhere near Cranor’s home) and obtained her number. She is the Federal Trade Commission’s chief technologist. Her impostor’s con netted two new iPhones (the priciest models—and the charges went to Cranor) with her number.

In a blog post, Cranor writes: “My phones immediately stopped receiving calls.” She was stiffed with “a large bill and the anxiety and fear of financial injury.”

Cranor was a victim of identity theft. She conta

It’s all about code—the building blocks of the Internet. Software code is full of unintentional defects. Governments are paying heavy prices to skilled hackers who can unearth these vulnerabilities, says an article at nytimes.com.

In fact, the FBI director, James B. Comey, recommended that the FBI pay hackers a whopping $1.3 million to figure out how to circumvent Apple’s iPhone security.

So driven is this “bug-and-exploit trade market,” that a bug-and-exploit hacking company, Hacking Team, ended

In 2015, depending on the kind and type of identity theft we are talking about, identity thieves impacted 1.5 million people or more, says the Javelin Strategy & Research report. That’s more than double than for 2014.

The move from stripe cards to chip cards has motivated crooks to fasten their seatbelts and really take off with an accelerated mode of operation. For them, your Social Security Number is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Thieves will use it to set up new accounts in the vi

Two thousand credit card payment terminals stand to become infected with malware called Trinity point of sales.

Ten million credit cards were stolen by hackers, called Fin6, who may end up scoring $400 million. The cards were stolen from retail and hospitality businesses. If each card sells for $21 on secret carder shops, you can see how the hackers will rake in hundreds of millions of dollars.

As you may know, the U.S. is gradually switching over to chip cards. But it will be a while—a very long

Do you work for a corporation, especially in the U.S.? You may be at risk for tax return fraud.

ADP is a payroll provider. Hackers were able to acquire tax information of employees of U.S. Bank from ADP. Now, this doesn’t mean that ADP was directly hacked into. Instead, what happened, it seems, their authentication system was flawed and ADP failed to implement a protection strategy for the personal data to keep it safe from prying eyes.

The crooks registered ADP accounts by using the stolen data o

Guess who may be compromising the security of your Social Security Number.

The Social Security Administration!

Yep, that’s right. Did you know that 66 percent of the mail the SSA sends out contains someone’s Social Security number? This is what the inspector general of the SSA, Kimberly Byrd, says, and I believe it.

How many pieces of mail is this? Over 230,000,000. This situation is problematic.

• The SSA claims it will cost over $19 million to reduce these mailings.
• It also won’t happen anytime soon.

Someone else might file your taxes if you don’t get to it. And they won’t be doing it as a favor; they’ll be doing it to steal your identity.

Here’s how it works:

• Cyber thieves send fraudulent e-mails to a business’s employees.
• The e-mails are designed to look like they came from the big wigs at the company.
• As a result, the targeted employees are tricked into revealing sensitive data about the company’s employees.
• The crooks end up with all this valuable data—enough to file phony tax returns.
• This pl

Apparently there are people who take pictures of their airplane boarding pass…and post it online. I’m dead serious. I’ve heard of toddlers getting excited over scraps of paper, but full-grown adults posting images of their boarding pass online? Don’t get me started.

Let’s just only say that this is incredulously absurd. Like, who cares about your bleepity bleep boarding pass, right? OK, you got bumped up to First class. SAVE IT. Well wait a minute. Fraudsters care.

Fraudsters also care about the b

The Identity Protection PIN tool on the IRS.gov site has been temporarily suspended—because it was recently hacked into. The tool provides retrieval of forgotten or lost IP PINs to users who want an extra layer of protection against identity theft.

But some users who received the IP PINs recently via the online tool learned that a thief had used their IP PIN to file tax returns in their name.

So now, for the moment, you cannot use the IRS’s online function to retrieve your IP PIN; meanwhile, the I

Here’s one for the know-it-alls: Kids are 35 percent more likely to become victims of identity theft than are adults. Betcha didn’t know that! This startling news comes from a 2015 Javelin Strategy & Release study.

Needless to say, the bulk of parents aren’t on top of this problem, unaware that thieves go after children’s SSNs like two-year-olds grabbing at candy. Thieves know that kids (and their parents) don’t monitor their credit reports. Thieves know that they can get away with their crime al

13.1 million people were stricken by identity theft last year in America, reports a study by Javelin Strategy & Research which reveals:

• Many people who don’t trust their banks are unwittingly doing things that make crime easier for crooks. This includes not using the bank’s protection services such as e-mail alerts.
• Oddly, there are more victims than ever, but the total amount stolen is less. But that hardly matters when you consider that in the past six years, $112 billion have been stolen.
• 18 per

Cyber criminals have been attempting to extort money from individuals and companies for many years, and the latest attempt to take advantage of others is by using Ransomware as a Service, or RaaS.

A ransomware virus infects a computer when a user clicks a link and unknowingly download a malicious file. The ransomware virus then encrypts the computer’s files and promises to render them useless unless the victim pays a ransom. The cost varies greatly and groups sending these out can bring in hundre

Often, hucksters prey on the consumer’s desperation, which is why it’s no surprise that the No. 1 rip-off (at least between 2011 and 2012)) was bogus products promising weight loss.

VICE (vice.com) interviewed psychologist Maria Konnikova about how cyber cons are so successful—even with the most ridiculous sounding bait (Nigerian prince, anyone?).

The bait becomes more attractive when the target is receiving an influx of cyber attention. Sad to say, this trips up a person’s rationale, making them

What are you doing to prevent tax identity theft? Do you even know what steps to take? You’d better, because this crime has tripled since 2010, says the FTC.

A report on foxbusiness.com describes tax identity theft as the act of stealing someone’s personal information, then the crook files a phony tax return in the victim’s name to get a refund. The victim will never see it in their mailbox. And that’s only the beginning of the victim’s problems.

First, your complaint that you didn’t get your chec

As part of Gemalto’s #ChipAwayAtFraud campaign, I’m being tasked with numerous tasks, some tacky, some essential to living. Gemalto, one of the world’s leaders in digital security, wants a real-world take on the EMV card experience. Which includes the security benefits EMV cards presents. You know EMV; it’s the “chip” credit card that by now, you should have. EMV by the way stands for Euro/MasterCard/Visa. The Euro part essentially means that’s where the card was first deployed.

If you don’t have