Tag: Fraud
Limewire fraudster arrested for massive online thievery
That’s an official offence in the UK, y’know: ‘Massive Online Thievery’. Well, it should be. Usually it’s the sort of phrase used by the music industry to describe what happens on P2P file-sharing services like Limewire, but in this case, I’m talking about a bloke using Limewire to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from fellow users.
London is an internet fraudster's paradise
Anti-fraud firm Early Warning has released new figures showing that crafty cockneys are the Brits most likely to be fraudulently obtaining goods over the internet. The company has even worked it out by postcode, identifying SE18 as the ‘Card Fraud Capital of Europe’. Those pesky Thamesmead residents, eh?
Opinion: Facebook numpties deserve to be defrauded!
Jonathan Weinberg writes…
Two days into the week and TWO Facebook security threats appear. The first in The Guardian on Monday warned secret code from FB’s inner-workings had been published on the internet prompting warnings of a security risk for users. Boring! Code, schmode, it’s far too technical.
But then this piece of wonder appeared today in The Times and it’s far more worrying, not least because everyone I know does it – and also because it involves a frog!
Freddi Staur is a cute green frog who has stolen email addresses and mobile phone numbers from users on the social network website – in an experiment to show how easily people give out their personal information to strangers…
Second-hand computers an ID fraudster's paradise
New research from Navigant Consulting suggests that slack handling of computers destined for the second-hand market could make them an identity-thief’s dream.
To demonstrate the potential dangers, the consultancy purchase three second-hand computers last week, and determined that one of them still contained sensitive personal information on the hard drive.
It’s not enough to simply wipe the hard drive using most basic operating system tools, as anyone with some tech knowledge can recover data from a disk that’s supposedly been wiped. Simply dumping the hard drives intact isn’t a good plan either – it’s akin to putting your paper-based financial documents in the waste bin without shredding them first.
One second-hand computer recovered from a community college still contained student and staff details, including names and addresses, budgets, payroll information, photos, and bank account details.
AOL cash in on fear of identity theft, for just £7 a month
AOL seems to have decided that it's time to branch out from their core business of providing Internet access and services, and instead are offering to be a go-between for credit reference agencies and an insurance company.
UK Internet users failing to take responsibility for online safety
A new study from the Get Safe Online (GSO) campaign revealed that nearly one in eight UK web users were a victim of online fraud last year, and that the average personal loss totalled £875, not to mention the stress…