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So someone comes up to you in a restaurant—a complete stranger—and asks to look at your driver’s license. What do you do? Show it to that person? You’d have to be one loony tune to do that.

However, this same blindness to security occurs all the time when a person is tricked by a “phishing” e-mail into typing in the password and username for their bank, or it may be the login credentials for their PayPal account or health plan carrier.

Phishing e-mails are a favorite scam of cyber criminals. THEY

Talk about getting taken to the cleaners: Imagine you spot a great summer rental property advertised online. Looks wonderful. The deal sounds too good to be true, but the owner tells you (via e-mail or even phone) that the fee is correct. You apply for the rent and send in the required upfront payment.

Then you head down there for the first time to see an empty lot. It then dawns on you that the owner was really a crook who used some photo he found online and advertised it for rent. And if losing

Do you know what ATM stands for? For crooks, it stands for A Thief’s Moneymaker.

A new report from FICO says that “skimming” crimes have made their biggest spike in the past 20 years. This includes ATMs on bank premises, but of course, public ATM kiosks have seen the biggest spike.

The thief tampers with the ATM’s card receiver; the installed gadget collects card data which the thief retrieves later. “Skimming,” as this is called, also refers to capturing the PIN via a hidden camera.

With the stole

With all the increased news coverage of kids running off with adults they met online, and kids dying by suicide supposedly due to online bullying, many parents are wondering if their worries about their kids being online are justified.

We hardly hear about how social media has benefited kids. There’s nothing inherent about electronic communications or electronic media that makes it bad for kids. There will always be bad people out there—online and offline.

An article on commonsensemedia.org lists

At any given time, someone, somewhere, is probably googling you. This could be a former classmate, a neighbor, someone you’re trying to do business with, a relative, who knows?

Are you confident that whatever they find will be information that’s truly representative of you? Maybe if you have a really common name, it may be lost in cyber muddle, but the more unusual your name is (or how the first name is spelled), the easier it will be to find you. If you want a clean online presence, there are th

You’d think that it would be as easy as pie to avoid getting reeled in by a phishing scam. After all, all you need to do is avoid clicking on a link inside an email or text message. How easy is that?

A phishing scam is a message sent by a cybercriminal to get you to click on a link or open an attachment. Clicking on the link or attachment downloads a virus, or takes you to a malicious website (that often looks like real site).

You are then tricked into entering user names, passwords and other sens

There will always be the person who lives on the Equator to whom you can sell an electric heater. As they say, there is a sucker born every minute.

This is why cyber criminals will always have a field day, like the crook who posed as a tax man who got an elderly couple to send $100,000 to an offshore bank account after he tricked them.

This was a fear-based scam. The other two categories are compassion and self-interest. And just because a person can’t be frightened doesn’t mean that their heart s

Tax ID Theft

Three things in life are guaranteed: death, taxes and tax-related identity theft. Michael Kasper would agree. Someone registered Kasper’s IRS.gov account, requested the document for his 2013 tax return, then filed a 2014 tax return.

The crook used a middleman—an innocent woman who answered his Craigslist ad for a moneymaking opportunity. He sent the money to her bank account, then she wired it to Nigeria, not knowing she was helping the crook.

Kasper’s account got busted into when the

Hackers love LinkedIn because it links them in—straight through the portal of the targeted company. Geez, how much easier could this be, what with all the publically-exposed e-mail addresses of key players (and also worker bees) in big companies that someone wants to hack.

An article on blog.sungardas.com was written by a white-hatter (his job is to try to hack his clients’ systems so that they know how to make them more impenetrable to the bad guys). The author says he’d make a beeline to Linked

10 years ago, many of us were hearing about social media for the first time. Now, social media plays a giant role in our lives, allowing us to share pictures, connect with family and friends, and get updated news. Through social media, we can express ourselves to our inner circle and the world.

So how devastating would it be if someone got a hold of your social media accounts?

They could really wreak some havoc, like sending dirty links to all of your followers on Twitter. Or worse, take personal

The IRS isn’t your biggest enemy during tax season. It’s the criminals who pretend to be IRS reps and then con people out of their money. They contact potential victims chiefly through phone calls and text messages.

Typically, the message is threatening in tone and/or content, informing the target they’ll be arrested if they don’t immediately send the IRS owed money. The threat may also be deportation or a driver’s license suspension (that last one is really silly, but people actually do fall for

Is it Bank of America’s fault that a hospital was hacked and lost over a million dollars? Chelan County Hospital No. 1 certainly thinks so, reports an article on krebsonsecurity.com. In 2013, the payroll accounts of the Washington hospital were broken into via cyberspace.

Bank of America got back about $400,000, but the hospital is reeling because the hospital says the bank had been alerted by someone with the Chelan County Treasurer’s staff of something fishy. The bank processed a transfer reque

It’s easy to scam someone who did something wrong by telling them they need to fix their mistake. This is why thousands of people get scammed into paying back taxes to the IRS—the IRS has nothing to do with these scams, of course, but the predators prey on peoples’ fear of Uncle Sam. It all begins with the fraudster making a phone call, pretending to be an IRS employee.

They have other tricks up their sleeve too, such as making the caller ID show a number that appears to be coming from the IRS an

It’s amazing how ingenious cybercriminals are, but the victims also need to take some responsibility for falling for these ruses, especially when the victim is a business that has failed to train its employees in cybersecurity measures.

Ransomware

The stuff of science fiction is here: Who would have ever thought there’d ever be a such thing as criminals remotely stealing someone’s personal information (word processing files, any kind of image, etc.), scrambling it up via encryption, then demanding

One of the arguments against being very virtually social is that nobody is SO important that everyone wants to know, for instance, that this person is going to be at the local sports bar watching the Super Bowl (or almost nobody; sad to say, some celebrities have half the world following them).

Another argument, however, against tweeting and posting your every move is that this tells burglars when you’ll be away from your house.

So, you’re important enough to post every detail of your life on Face

You may think you’re not dumb enough to fall for scams, but consider that someone you care deeply about is naïve enough to be conned. Besides, some scams are so clever that even those who think they’re scam-proof have actually been taken for a ride.

Sometimes fraudsters pose as an authority figure. Some claim you won a prize, while others claim you’re in trouble. Some even claim they’re a family member (needing money) and have figured out a way to convince you of this.

Some scams are done via e-ma

After taking all the necessary steps to Fixing a Credit Report after being hacked, it is then tome to rebuild your credit. Bad credit is bad credit no matter how it happens. No matter how responsible you are with your money, you won’t get a loan if there’s no evidence of this. The evidence comes from having credit. You need to show lenders you can be trusted.

• Every time you apply for a credit card, this puts a dent in your credit score. In other words, it can negatively affect your scores especi

A recent study says that people are more mindful of online safety issues than what experts had previously believed. An article on phys.org says that Nitesh Saxena, PhD, wanted to know what goes on in users’ brains when they come upon malicious websites or malware warnings.

Saxena points out that past studies indicated that users’ minds are pretty much blank when it comes to malware signs. Saxena and colleagues used brain imaging (functional MRI) for their study.

Study subjects were asked to tell t

Ever hear of a crime called skimming? It may not be as dramatic a crime as assault or Ponzi schemes, but it can cause significant problems to you as your  savings account can be wiped out in a flash.

Picture a scrawny nerd tampering with an automated teller machine (ATM)—the machine you use with your debit card to get cash. The thief places a device over the slot through which you slide your debit card. You have no idea it’s there. You swipe your card, and the device “skims” or reads your card’s

What goes on in the home life of a 14-year-old girl such that she feels there’s nothing better to do than send nude photos of herself to a man whom she’s been corresponding with online? Though this goes well-beyond the parents not bothering to find out what their kids do online, another huge issue is the proliferation of online predators.

And for parents who DO care enough to monitor their kids’ cyber activities, here’s some unsettling news: A 2013 survey called  Digital Deception: Exploring the