New Hampshire Real Estate & Consumer Resources
Archive for June, 2007
It’s amazing how much excitement a new gadget can create when it is marketed the right way. More than a few people are calling the iPhone marketing campaign one of the best in history.
I don’t plan on getting an iPhone any time soon. I just don’t need it since I don’t go out all that much and cell phone coverage where I live is not so great anyway.
There are people who must have the latest cool gadgets “NOW,” and they are willing to camp outside a store for days or pay a ridiculously inflated price to own one. Are you one of them?
Do you want an iPhone? Did you miss your chance to get one yesterday on launch day? Are you aching to have one of those sleek beauties in your hot little hands? Do you dream of the iPhone when you go to sleep at night?
If the answer to those questions is “YES,” the next question you need to answer is: “How much are you willing to pay for one?”
To my amazement, Apple iPhones are selling on eBay right now and they are demanding some pretty hefty prices.
If you are interested, check out the iPhones on eBay by clicking the following link: iPhones on eBay right now.
I guess state employees in Ohio are on a roll. It was recently discovered that in addition to the 225,000 Ohio taxpayers whose personal information is on a missing computer backup tape, a laptop computer was stolen from another state employee.
On the stolen laptop is the social security numbers and other personal information belonging to 439 injured workers. Talk about adding insult to injury! Now, in addition to being injured, they can worry about someone stealing their identity!
The data is reported to be password-protected but that is probably not much protection if the laptop falls into the hands of tech-savvy crooks, and trust me, there are a lot of them around these days.
There appears to be no end in sight for incidents like this. As long as these big companies and government agencies continue with their lax practices concerning personal information, we will keep hearing stories like this.
Every time I see one of these stories, I just think to myself, “You’ve got to be kidding me. Not again!”
It seems like these stories are popping up every few weeks these days and who knows about the ones we never hear about.
This time a missing computer backup tape in Ohio is the problem. The tape is from a state database that contains information on state checks Ohio residents that have not yet cashed, some of them income tax refund checks and others lottery prize checks.
The data on the tape includes names, addresses, social security numbers and bank account numbers.
I suspect that we would all cringe if we knew how many databases contained some of our personal information. These days everything is kept on computer databases. Gone are the days of gray filing cabinets full of typewritten records.
As someone who worked in the computer industry for more than 20 years, I understand the importance of backups and making sure they were done was part of my job early in my career, so I certainly have no problem with backup tapes. What I have a problem with very often is the security of those tapes.
In this particular case, the backup tape was stolen from an state intern’s car. Makes you wonder what a low-level employee like an intern would be doing with a tape that has important personal information on it and why he would ever leave it unattended in his car.
Oh yeah, silly me. I am sure it was not the intern’s personal information on the tape. It was just a bunch of strangers, and who cares about them, right?
Apparently, too little attention is being devoted to the security of personal information and that needs to change.
The state of Ohio, to their credit, is paying for identity-theft protection service for those at risk. I just hope it’s a better service than the one my wife was given after some of her personal information was put at risk by a big financial company a couple of years ago. That service was painfully slow to issue alerts when something happened to one of her accounts, sometimes taking a month or more to send an alert.
I’ve recently learned about a fairly new identity-theft protection service that actually sounds pretty good. I’ll be looking into it a bit more and will probably talk about it at some point in the future.
If you want to take a look for yourself, click the following link:
This is appears to be a pretty wide-spread operation with people all over the U.S. reporting that they were scammed by an outfit that was known as “Centerline Financial Group” that claimed to be located in St. Louis.
Despite the claim that they were located in St. Louis, the people behind the operation were actually in Canada, where a lot of loan-related and sweepstakes scams seem to be originating lately.
Most consumers who are claiming to be victims of this scam tell a story similar to this:
They had a poor credit history and usually found it difficult to obtain loans. Some of them had hoped to rebuild their credit by taking out a loan to pay off all their bills.
Some of them were promised a 24-hour turnaround and were told they would have the money the day after they were approved. Naturally, for people who had a hard time getting loans, this was pretty exciting news and this is just what the typical scam artist wants. Making decisions based on emotions during times like this can be very dangerous.
For more details, please visit this page where you can also leave a comment or submit your story if you like.