Posts Tagged ‘identity thieves’

Lincoln National has begun notifying 1.2 million customers of a possible data breach, according to a letter posted to the New Hampshire Department of Justice’s Web site. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority was given a username and password combination that let anyone access Lincoln’s portfolio information system.
“This username and password had been shared among certain [...]

Computer security researchers discovered a new type of Trojan-horse software that is being used to steal money from consumers’ bank accounts.
Finjan Software Ltd. told CNET the software is designed to bypass systems that usually detect unusual transactions. The new software used by identity thieves determines how much is available in an infected computer user’s bank [...]

Identity thieves are now targeting military veterans and pretending to work for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
The identity thieves are telling the veterans that the VA is updating their prescription information and need their credit card information.
“America’s Veterans have become targets in an inexcusable scam that dishonors their service and misrepresents the Department built [...]

The University of California-Berkeley is notifying 493 applicants to the Graduate School of Journalism that their Social Security numbers and other personal information may have been stolen in a server data breach.
Early last month, UC-Berkeley IT staff discovered a website in which a hacker claimed to have broken into the journalism school’s web server. The [...]

The Better Business Bureau is warning that information circulating about a federal credit available to car buyers who trade in low-mileage vehicles for more-fuel efficient ones is false and is coming from con artists.
The real program is called the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS).  The organization said fraudsters are using catchy names and trying to lure consumers [...]

There is a nationwide VISA text messaging scam that is trying to trick cell phone users into handing over their bank account information.  The text messaging scam has hit thousands of individual across the US in the last few weeks.
The message received states “Due to unusual activity, your Visa account has been closed.”
People are under [...]

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 [...]

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 week the Identity Theft Resource Center warned job seekers to protect their personal information when they use the Web to look for work.
Since then, at least a dozen people have called fearing they fell for a scam, said Linda Foley, the center’s founder, even though there was a similar warning three months ago from [...]