Whenever I get in a dispute with a customer service agent, I try to humanize the dialog. “Do you think this is fair?” I’ll ask. And if I can pierce the corporate-speak at all, I usually saying something like, “Look, you are I have way more in common than you and [Keep reading]
One of the saddest chapters of U.S. higher education closed on Monday, as ITT Technical Institute suddenly announced it was shutting down. ITT has been hit with numerous legal actions, and just last week it finally received what amounted to a death penalty from the Department of Education — which [Keep reading]
How persistent and brazen are phantom debt collectors? Last month, when I emailed a firm named Advance Cash Services asking for comment on collection harassment allegations, the firm replied by saying I owed them $935.76 for an unpaid payday loan. A few days later, I wrote about Susan Marquardt of Chicago, who [Keep reading]
Another day, another reminder that companies don’t really have to abide by promises to NOT share your personal information. They have a big “but” in their contracts. Last week, it was WhatsApp and Facebook. We’ll get to that in a moment. This week, millions of Sports Authority customers began receiving notices [Keep reading]
The FBI has issued a warning that state board of election websites are being targeted by hackers, and in at least one case, voter data has been stolen. Yahoo News Michael Isikoff first reported the attack and posted the FBI warning online (against the FBI’s wishes). It’s very serious. Clearly the FBI [Keep reading]
Get used to another term in world of computer hacking: “economic warfare.” A French firm building multi-billion-dollar submarines for Australia and several other nations says it was the victim of economic warfare after some of its schematics for similar subs being built for India were released online, allegedly by hackers. The [Keep reading]
If you’re like me, you’re afraid to answer your cell phone. And that’s a bad thing for a reporter. It wasn’t always this way. For years, my cell phone number seemed to be out of the public domain, and even businesses that had it were pretty respectful of my need [Keep reading]
Sometimes, a glitch is more than a glitch. Sometimes, that glitch grinds much of the country to a halt. And it gets the company involved hauled in front of Congress to explain itself. Recent airline techno-disasters at Delta and Southwest — and United last year — have made one thing clear: Systems [Keep reading]
The switch to chip-enabled credit cards last year came with a serious deadline: New rules went into effect in October making merchants more liable for fraud. As is obvious to everyone who’s swiped when they should have inserted their card at a checkout line, the changeover hasn’t gone as smoothly [Keep reading]
Baseball has long celebrated cheating, but electronic cheating just sent a former team front-office worker to prison for nearly four years. Former St. Louis Cardinals scouting director Chris Correa, who earlier pled guilty to using old passwords to access a former team’s scouting database, was sentenced to 46 months in jail on Monday. Correa broke [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan