New Hampshire Real Estate & Consumer Resources

Archive for July, 2007

I sure hate to think about anyone losing their home to foreclosure, but like so many other things in life, one person’s misfortune is another’s opportunity. This is certainly the case in Massachusetts these days as the business of foreclosure has never been better.

 The Boston Herald reports that a record 23,600 foreclosures have occurred in the past year and Massachusetts newspapers have seen a 143% increase in advertising for foreclosure auctions.

Publishers are also getting in on the action with new books about investing in foreclosure properties. There is even a new one in the “Dummies” series for novice real estate investors.

There are numerous web sites offering foreclosure listings online for investors looking for foreclosure properties. Some sites, including those run by government agencies, offer foreclosure listings for free.

For a comprehensive listing of web sites offering foreclosure listings, you can check out this directory of foreclosure sites.

Reports are coming in for all around the country: Foreclosure rates are hitting record numbers these days.

In some areas, like Sacramento, California, ordinances are being revised due to the large number of houses that are becoming vacant due to foreclosures.

The idea is to reduce the time the city has to wait before taking action on a vacant house before it becomes a ‘nuisance; property.

A few months ago I saw a news report on this very subject. According to the report, many foreclosures are due to homeowners that opted for adjustable rate mortgages and when the rates rise, the homeowners are no longer able to make their mortgage payments.

In some areas of California, foreclosures are up as much as 799% over the same period just last year.

Lending giant Countrywide Financial Corporation has reported a sharp increase in delinquent mortgages. As the nations’s largest mortgage lender, it is likely a indicator of a trend that is plaguing the entire country.

In Illinois, foreclosures were up 55% last year and are on track to eclipse that number this year. 

It’s certainly not often that I am able to praise the actions of the government in my former home state of Massachusetts, so I will seize this rare opportunity to report passage on what appears to be a good bill aimed at preventing identity theft.

You may recall the well-known data breach a while back where retail giant TJX managed to facilitate the loss of personal information belonging to millions of customers when hackers somehow penetrated their systems.

Well, this new legislation does exactly what was needed to help prevent this type of thing and at the very least, force companies to promptly report incidents like this in the future. Unlike TJX, who kept the news of the breach to themselves while they probably figured out how to minimize the damage to their reputation.

Companies will now face fines for violating the new rules. I’m hopeful this will convince companies to stay in compliance since facing monetary loss is really the only thing many of these big companies pay attention to.

There are also new rules about destroying personal information that is being disposed of, which may make “dumpster diving” in the Bay State a bit less productive for identity thieves in the future.

The legislation now moves on to the governor for his signature and I expect it will meet with his approval.

For more details, check out this article.

There are reports that some New Hampshire residents are receiving letters that are intended to convince the recipient to send personal information.

These letters are often started by addressing the recipient as “Dear Cardmember,” a greeting that has been used by credit card companies in communications with customers.

At least on variation of this scam involves a letter informing the recipient that a recent payment they have made was not able to be processed and that a new payment needs to be made and instructs the recipient to write their account number on the check.

This type of scam may also find it’s way to consumers by way of e-mail or through a telephone call. The goal appears to be collect account numbers that can be used to make fraudulent purchases or to use for other identity theft crimes.

Always be suspicious of anyone who is asking for an account number or other personal information and be sure you verify that a request is valid before providing any kind of personal information to anyone.

According to this report, AOL or America Online as they are otherwise known, has agreed to pay $3 Million to settle with 48 states and Washington, D.C. to avoid lawsuits.

The once-mighty Internet giant has been accused of somewhat-less-than-satisfactory customer service when dealing with customers who wished to cancel their AOL service.

You may recall a recording a while back that enjoyed wide circulation and was created by a former AOL customer who called the company to cancel his service. The customer service representative was so obnoxious that it defied the imagination and was instrumental in showing the company’s true colors.

Well, now some information is coming out that reveals why some of those AOL customer service reps were trying to hold on to customers as if their lives depended on it. In some cases, they were being offered as much as $3,000 as a bonus for convincing a customer to remain as a customer that called the company to cancel their service.

These shenanigans resulted in a massive flood of complaints about AOL to consumer agencies that led to the threat of lawsuits which forced AOL to see the light and offer a settlement and hopefully bring an end to the aggressive tactics that had been used in an attempt to retain fleeing customers.

I’ve talked about AOL here before and they have long been on my list of most-hated companies. As a result, I am just thrilled to see them being forced into shelling out big money to pay for their sins.

AOL found itself in trouble back in 2005 for similar transgressions and had to pay out $1.25 Million in penalties and at the time had agreed to improve the way they handled customer cancellations. So much for that promise. Maybe this latest big payout will convince them to follow through on their promises this time.

I’ve talked here about pump-and-dump stock scams as well as “bot nets” in the past, and this story combines these two subjects nicely and shows how computer hacking has evolved from an activity that was once practiced mostly by teenagers to impress their peers into a huge criminal enterprise where serious money is being made by serious crooks.

Two Texas men stand accused of using a computer bot net to pump out spam e-mail messages that were used to artificially inflate the price of certain stocks that they had purchased.

In a nutshell, a bot net is a collection of computers that have been infected with a program that allows someone else to control them from across the Internet without the computer owner’s knowledge. Many of these are typical home computers like those you probably have on your desk.

The collective power of thousands of computers under the control of one “bot master” is quite impressive and it is quite common for the computers in the bot net to be used for sending spam e-mail messages.

Like any typical pump-and-dump scam, the price of the stocks in question was driven higher with the help of the spam e-mail message and the guys behind the scam sold off their shares for a nice profit.

Since the scammers usually hold a massive amount of shares, the sell-off that results when they take their profits most often caused the prices of the stock to plummet, which leaves naive investors holding the bag.

Since it is illegal to send spam, you can be quite certain than any spam e-mail messages you receive that are promoting stocks are coming from people who are trying to sucker you into a pump-and-dump scam. You are better off just deleting them.

The most recent New Hampshire towns to struggle with the issue of electronic signs are Meredith and Moultonboro. Some residents in those towns are not happy about the notion that new electronic signs may be employed by local businesses.

In Moultonboro, the issue came to the forefront after a real estate company erected an electronic sign to advertise its services.

I’m quite familiar with this issue since a town in this area is also dealing with exactly the same issue and it is a struggle that has been going on for a couple of years now.

A real estate company is also at the center of the controversy in this area and despite the company having lost a court battle and being told to take the sign down, instead they have appealed to a higher court and the sign remains in operation in the meanwhile.

I happen to agree with the residents that want these kinds of signs kept out of their towns. There is a place for signs like that, places with names like Nashua and Manchester.

I agree with the person who was quoted in the Concord Monitor article on this subject who said, “When you’re trying to sell rural New Hampshire and make it look like a Vegas strip, I think it’s an oxymoron.”

Someone else made the argument that local businesses need support and that banning electronic signs might contribute to putting them out of business.

I agree that local businesses need support, but suggesting that the lack of an electronic sign would put someone out of business is ridiculous. Any business that fails due to the inability to put up an electronic sign was going to fail on its own, with or without an electronic sign.

I guess being a crook is just in some people’s blood or something. That appears to be the case for a Houston criminal by the name of Harris Dempsey ”Butch” Ballow.

Out on bail and already in trouble for allegedly being involved in a stock market scam, Ballow is now accused of cooking up another one.

This is the typical penny stock pump-and-dump scam that I have talked about here before, and is exactly the reason why investors should steer clear of penny stocks.

As tempting is it may sound to make a grand fortune trading penny stocks, the vast majority of investors lose money and in the worst cases, like with these penny stock scams, they lose money because some lowlife manages to pull of a scam like the one Harris Dempsey ”Butch” Ballow is accused of.

In this case, penny stock investors — no doubt with dreams of big profits dancing in their heads — were scammed out of a total of $3 Million.

In these types of scams, the scam artists manipulate the price of a stock by making up phony news and information about the company and sending it out via fax, news releases and e-mail. Maybe you’ve received some of these “stock alert” e-mail messages yourself. I used to get a lot of them, but these days I am not receiving any at all.

Investors who hear all this bogus information about how wonderfully the company is doing and how their share price is expected to skyrocket, buy up the stock and wait for their profits to come pouring in.

The smart ones who may be lucky enough to get in before the price spikes, sell out when they have a profit, but most investors are either too late getting in, too greedy to sell for a modest profit or hold the stock too long with the hopes that the price will recover after the big drop that occurs when the scam artist dumps all of his shares and makes a nice profit.

Since the scam artist owns a huge number of shares that were purchased very cheaply before the pump-and-dump was started, he makes a huge profit off of the investors that bought in as the stock price was rising.

I did my share of penny stock trading a few years ago and although I was never the victim of a scam that I am aware of, I lost a lot more money than I ever made trading penny stocks.

As I heard many times during my penny stock trading days, but refused to believe at the time: They are called “penny stocks” for a reason and they are so cheap because that is what they are worth.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, my advice is to stay far away from penny stocks. There may be some seasoned investors that know how to successfully trade penny stocks, but unless you are one of them, trading penny stocks is much more likely to lose you money than to make it.