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]
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 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]
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