ID Theft

[[AK]Hylander]

I came across this article today and to be honest, I didn't even know it was in effect. I had heard about it awhile ago, but had no idea it was implemented anywhere.

Freeze your credit file

As the article says, it probably isn't for most people - But just an FYI

[[AK]Hylander]

More ID Theft potential fun

[Slaughter]

The Les Divx site through that google link is kinda scary.

[[AK]Nuts]

That's some pretty nice information on that google link.

Two personal stories:

I was ordering a product online from a small company. After navigating through their site and finalizing my purchase, I wanted to go back to check something. Unfortunately when I hit the back button I got 'page can not be refreshed' yadda yadda yadda. So i stripped off the last portion of the URL and tried that. I was placed in a nice open root directory. Cool. I found a directory called customers. Hmmmmm. I opened it up and lo and behold it was all their customer data. Name, address, phone number, what they ordered and all their credit card data. I immediately e-mailed the company and got no response the next day. So I did a whois and e-mailed the technical contact. I got a nasty letter back within minutes saying that his server was secure and to mind my own business. Fine. I e-mailed him a chunk of the information I saw on the site. Within 10 minutes the site was completely offline. I wonder if anyone has e-mailed the Les Divx guys yet?

Story two. Earlier this week the credit union that holds our car note sent us a real nice letter stating that a 'member business' suffered an office break-in and that a laptop that contained credit union members' names, addresses and SSN's had been stolen. We were told not to worry as the laptop was password protected and would take a 'sophisticated process' to bypass the security. (Ya, like we all don't have a custom bootable unix disc sitting around that allows you to manipulate the Windows SAM. If you need a copy, let me know). The credit union stated that the 'member business' was in the business of offering 'pre-approved credit cards' to credit union members. Now I wonder why they would need to keep that data on a laptop? I wonder how much the credit union made for selling my personal information. I wonder how the credit union was going to protect me now that my personal information was stolen? Well, I called them and they were soooo nice in offering to monitor my credit union account for unusual activity. Um... "what about the rest of my credit? I don't give a crap about the credit union, I'm worried about other forms of credit being opened!" They finally agreed to pay for credit monitoring in full for 1 year. Nice.


EDIT: Out of curiousity I called one of the numbers listed on the Les Divx site... a lutheran church in TX. The guy stated that they recently had to cancel that credit card because of fraud. So it seems that all those cards are or at least were valid. I ran a search on my visa (first 4 only) and found even more cards out there. WOW. Now if only I wasn't so scared of prison sex I could get myself a nice big TV! Also, I sent a note to Drudge... let's see if he runs it.

[[AK]Hylander]

We don't sell our information to any third parties. Every since the big requirement for privacy policies and sending them out every year to your customer/members - we decided it was much easier to comply if we simply didn't do it. (And we never had before either).