Posts from ‘May, 2009’

Responding to growing concerns about the nation’s online security, President Obama will select a cyber security czar.
In a White House event, Obama said Americans are dependent on computers but he cited the dark side of the cyber world, including identity theft and attempted cyber attacks on national security systems.
Obama stressed the U.S. is “not as [...]

The Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) released a significant report Wednesday on the impact of identity theft victimization.  The following are highlights of The Aftermath 2008 study.
Medical Identity Theft:  In 2008, ITRC introduced a set of questions to monitor this issue.  More than 2/3 of those responding to these questions reported that medical providers billed [...]

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) said census workers are easy to identify. They will have a badge, a handheld device, a Census Bureau canvas bag and a confidentiality notice. The BBB strongly advises to ask for identification and to see their badge before answering questions.
The Census Bureau said its workforce will either walk or drive [...]

Phony text messages received on your cell phone are known as “smishing” and are equivalent to phony computer e-mail message scams called phishing.  The name was derived from SMS (Short Message Service) the technology used for text messages on cell phones.  Identity thieves are using smishing, to steal personal and financial information.
Both phony text messages [...]

The NYPD has crushed a sophisticated identity theft ring that wrecked the credit of 6,000 victims and bilked banks out of $15million in bogus charges.  The scam, which stretched from New York to Nigeria, is one of the largest operations of its kind dismantled by the NYPD, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Thursday.
The thieves somehow [...]

Women become victims of identity theft more often than men and lose more money they never recover, according to a new report by the Affinion Security Center, an ID theft security company.
Twenty-eight percent of women surveyed said they were victims of identity theft, compared with 21 percent of males, the poll found.
The national survey also [...]

University of California, Berkeley officials say 97,000 Social Security numbers and the names that go with them were stolen from a campus health services computer server.
Hackers had been operating in the campus system since October 2008. The breach was discovered when routine IT maintenance in April found taunting messages left by the hackers. The taunting [...]

Last year, the federal government delayed new rules requiring creditors and financial institutions to develop identity theft prevention programs because of confusion.
The Red Flags Rules - part of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act - take effect today.
The Federal Trade Commission, which enforces the act, estimates that the rules will affect more than 11 [...]