Something has been bothering me about this very public Apple vs. FBI UFC legal battle. Recall that a California judge has ordered Apple to help the FBI circumvent encryption on an iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino terrorists. Apple is refusing. Here’s my question: What does the FBI think [Keep reading]
Now that credit cards have been chipped, the banking industry has set its sights on modernizing another essential financial tool that’s stuck in the 1980s — ATMs. You might have noticed that the fancy chip-enabled debit card you received does you no good at the ATM. That means counterfeit debit [Keep reading]
Hackers are still stealing money from Starbucks customers using a simple attack on the coffee giants’ app users, BobSullivan.net has learned. Nearly a year after my initial story exposed widespread attacks on app users’ bank accounts, the security problems plaguing Starbucks’ auto-reload and linked bank account features persist. Starbucks did [Keep reading]
It’s the pay, stupid. Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 on a simple, perceptive platform: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Well, the U.S. unemployment rate is remarkably low, but everyone seems remarkably unimpressed. Why? Because a job isn’t a good job. America has about 100 million problems right now, and no one’s [Keep reading]
Michelle Nix has lived in a lot of places: Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Oakland, Calif. But when it came time to start a family, she went home to Cincinnati. Smart move. The once-battered Midwest city is in the middle of a radical transformation – and it ranks 8th in our [Keep reading]
Online dating is HOT. How hot? Clicking and swiping for love has tripled among young people since 2013, the Pew Research Center says in a study released just in time for Valentine’s Day. Some 27% of Americans ages 18 to 24 now report using online dating, up from just 10% [Keep reading]
Auto insurers levy something akin to a home renters’ surcharge on policy-holders, and that’s unfair, the Consumer Federation of America alleged on Monday. The interest group says it secret-shopped for typical driver policies in 10 U.S. cities and found renter rates averaged 7% higher – costing those consumers $112 annually [Keep reading]
Remember the BillFixers brothers I wrote about last month (and I’ll write about each month in The BillFixers Files). That story got a lot of attention: I did a version for NBCNews.com, the New York Times picked it up, and NBC Nightly News is going to feature the brothers on national [Keep reading]
Let’s say you could use some extra cash, and someone offered you a quick-and-dirty part-time gig with OUTRAGEOUS pay. Say …$200 an hour. SCORE, right? Well, I’m here to tell you that just about every one of us has a $200-an-hour job lying somewhere nearby, if only we know how to [Keep reading]
Even under normal circumstances, racial discrimination can be hard to spot. Identifying discrimination in car purchases and loans is particularly challenging, however – auto dealers don’t have to log the ethnicity of borrowers, and car loan terms are often bargained as part of a complex transaction. Still, the Consumer Financial [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan