Criminals armed with a flood of data stolen in recent data breaches are newly targeting consumers where it might hurt most: their retirement accounts. The lucrative crime of brokerage account takeovers isn’t new, but it appears identity thieves are having more luck recently raiding victims’ retirements, tricking brokers into emptying [Keep reading]
(NOTE: This is a free excerpt from my new book: Gotcha Capitalism, 10 years later. A lot has happened in the world of credit cards since 2008. It’s fun to look back….) Gift cards could be pretty diabolical when they burst onto the scene in the late 1990s. Junk fees [Keep reading]
Facebook is having a tough time controlling its reputation for unfairly impacting political events, and this won’t help: the social media giant can make users “like” a political candidate’s page without their consent. It just happened to me. I’m a journalist, so I don’t like any any political pages, unless [Keep reading]
If you think fake news is bad, wait until fake news video becomes a thing. Or until an entire generation of kids hacked by Silicon Valley’s attention-mining tools comes of age. Or until Facebook throws up its hands and realizes it simply can’t stop the Frankenstein it has created. We’re [Keep reading]
If you’re thinking about applying for a new credit card or asking for a higher limit on a card you already have, you might want to do that sooner rather than later. The thing with kreditkort, Swedish for credit cards, and credit card issuers, is that they’ve been on a [Keep reading]
(NOTE: This is a free excerpt from my new book: Gotcha Capitalism, 10 years later. A lot has happened in the world of credit cards since 2008. It’s fun to look back….) When I began writing Gotcha Capitalism sometime in 2006, there was only one choice for Chapter One: credit [Keep reading]
If we won’t hold our politicians accountable, perhaps we’ll hold our technology accountable. We’d better start somewhere soon, before America is reduced to an unrecognizable Tower of Babel. This week, there were signs of hope for this, but also signals that the worst might be yet to come. I’ll start [Keep reading]
Identity theft was a bad news, even worse news story in 2017, a new report has found. Despite a painful transition to fraud-fighting chip-enabled credit cards, and a series of other changes designed to stem the tide of fraud, identity theft actually swelled to record highs last year. Making matters [Keep reading]
Unless you are living under a rock, you now know that the stock market is in the middle of that time-honored tradition called a “correction” — as in, months and months of tidy gains in your retirement account have been lost in just a day or two. At one point [Keep reading]
When ATMs were first invented, the obvious nightmare scenario involved someone figuring out how to walk around draining machines of all cash. Well, that nightmare has just arrived in the U.S. Hackers have figured out how to trick machines into spitting out all their $20 bills, hit-the-jackpot style, minuses the [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan