Wasting time recently on a discussion board for rabid sports fans, my eyes stopped on a phrase that shocked me: “endowment effect.” Dropped casually in among the emotional discussion of who’s the best offensive or defensive player was a high-fallutin’ term from economics. I thought it out of place for [Keep reading]
The FCC is issuing fresh warnings about so-called “neighbor spoofing” as the agency plans a fresh push to tamp down illegal robocalls — and scammers continue to perfect their tools of evasion. Neighbor spoofing involves spam calls that arrive appearing to come from a nearby phone number. If your number [Keep reading]
“You’ve been hacked. But there’s hope. Let me explain.” Writing a book is a very long journey. Re-writing a book, 10 years later, is an even longer journey. But that’s where I have arrived, and I invite you dear reader to come along with me. More than a decade ago, [Keep reading]
We’ve heard about the identity theft epidemic for so long that many have become numb to the news, and the large numbers — 50 million stolen credit cards here, 150 million stolen Social Security numbers there. But this is no time for complacency. There were two bits of very bad [Keep reading]
If you receive an unexpected deposit from the IRS into your bank account in the next few weeks, don’t celebrate. You are likely a victim of a nasty, ingenious new form of ID theft designed by criminals to evade updated IRS security protections. In other words, in this cat and [Keep reading]
WARNING: Zelle isn’t really a safe way to send money. Huh? But it’s backed by all these big banks! Read on… Every time a new payment app bursts on the scene, there’s a fraud learning curve. Companies never emphasize enough how risky the new app is, and consumers always learn [Keep reading]
Mark was getting ready for bed last October when a disturbing notification arrived in his email – there had been a “change” in his credit information, a credit monitoring service warned. Filled with dread, he logged in and found the trouble: a black mark on his credit report, claiming [Keep reading]
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]
Bob Sullivan