Items tagged with identity theft
Any PIN code is better than no PIN code, right? If you are a Comcast Xfinity Mobile customer, you may want to change your default PIN. Xfinity Mobile’s easy-to-guess default PIN has resulted in the hijacking of several phone numbers and identity theft. Comcast wanted to make it easier for customers to transfer a device to a new carrier. They do not prompt customers to punch in a unique PIN when the customer creates a new account; Instead, they decided that “0000” would be the default PIN for all customers. This plan has quickly backfired. Xfinity Mobile customer Larry Whitted of California reported to the Washington Post that an identity thief had been able to access Whitted’s...
Read more...
eBay on Thursday announced a giant new strategy for PayPal that it hopes will squash the up-and-coming threat of Apple and Google with near-field communications payments. In one of those karmic twists, earlier this week news broke on the very thing that would let people feel safe enough to outfit their mobile devices with NFC payment systems: identity theft is becoming harder to pull off. The Nokia 6216 has supported NFC since 2009. In 2010, the number of identity theft incidents hit their lowest levels in years, according to a new report by Javelin Strategy & Research. The total number of incidents dropped 28 percent and the total annual fraud also decreased to $37 billion from $56 billion...
Read more...
Identity theft has been in the news for some time now. It’s certainly not something any of us want to deal with, but it seems more and more people are becoming victims. In 2008, the Federal Trade Commission reported a surge in the number of cases. In fact, 26% of all complaints received by the FTC involved identity theft. This category involved the largest number of complaints to the FTC in 2008. The next biggest complaint was third party and creditor debt collection scams, which represented 9% of complaints. According to the FTC’s annual Consumer Sentinel Network report (PDF link), there were 313,982 identity theft complaints in 2008, compared to 259,266 in 2007. The Consumer Sentinel Network...
Read more...
This could also be known as ID theft due to software misconfiguration. This ID thief was using LimeWire to steal sensitive information from users' computers. But the only way this could happen is if the user misconfigured the software to include directories with sensitive info in them. The scheme undertaken by 35-year-old Gregory Kopiloff worked something like this, according to the U.S. Department of Justice: He'd use identity information gleaned from those documents to open credit accounts over the Internet, buy goods over the Internet, ship them to various mailboxes in the Puget Sound area and resell the merchandise for about half its retail price. Investigators said his scheme had...
Read more...
