New Hampshire Real Estate & Consumer Resources

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.

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:

LifeLock

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.

Ah, May must be the time of year when the pink sleaze blossoms. It was during the month of May last year that I entered here the first post featuring “Pat Haines” and his or her merry band of pushy salesdroids at N.M.E., which as I recall, stands for “National Magazine Exchange.”

This year Pat has decided to address the pink sleaze to my wife. It’s is essentially the same crap we received last year except this time the envelope has “SECOND NOTICE” stamped on the front, which is obviously some kind of marketing tactic that probably results in a higher percentage of this crap actually being opened by unsuspecting recipients.

The “SECOND NOTICE” is a complete lie, by the way. Unless of course, they are counting last year as the “FIRST NOTICE” because this garbage has not shown up here in our mailbox since last May and believe me, I would notice if it did.

The other difference between this new arrival and last year’s was that “Ladies Home Journal” was printed on the inside of it and this year it has been replaced with “SHAPE” which must me the name of another magazine these weasels are hawking.

The language on the inside is also been beefed up a bit with ominous warning that there is now a “deadline” involved on which the prized “ID Number” will expire and presumably dash our chances of striking it bloody stinking rich by way of their fabulous sweepstakes. More typical sales-crap designed to introduce a sense of urgency that is meant to influence the recipient to take quick action and call N.M.E. for the obligatory pushy sales pitch.

I won’t bother posting the images of this year’s arrival since it differs so little from last year’s. I suppose we can look forward to another visit from Pat next year by way of the U.S. Postal Service. Yes another reason to look forward to spring each and every year!

So why is it that you should not be afraid to use your credit card online? There are a couple of reasons. Let me explain.

The first reason is that if you are in the United States, there is a law that protects you from online credit card fraud by limiting your losses to $50. Sure, losing $50 would not be a good thing, but it is a heck of a lot better than losing $100 or $1000 or whatever amount some crook decided to charge on your account.

The second reason, as I have recently learned, is that it is the merchant that is taking all the risk by offering customers the ability to pay online by credit card.

As I have mentioned before, I have a hobby-related site where I sell a few items online. It is not a huge business and does not make tons of money but it adds nicely to my income on a pretty regular basis.

Like most other online businesses, I wanted to be able to offer my customers the ability to pay right on my web site with a credit card. Isn’t that the way everyone wants to shop online these days? I know I do!

For the first year or so that my site was online, I used PayPal to process all the credit card orders for my customers. It seemed to work well but the only problem I had with the process was that my customers would be taken to the PayPal website during the checkout process before they could complete their order. It all seemed to work fine, but I felt like I was making the checkout process more difficult than it needed to be and everything I ever read about running an e-commerce website said that it needs to be as easy as possible for customers to complete their order.

Sometime last year, PayPal came out with a new service that would allow you to process customer orders right on your website without forcing customers to the PayPal site. What a great idea that was! It was just what I was waiting for.

The only problem was that the software I was using on my website could only make use of the new PayPal system if I applied a boatload of programming code to my website by hand and even then I could not be sure it would work.

Since I was not able to use the new PayPal system at the time, I decided to look into the possibility of signing up for a more traditional merchant account that would allow me to accept credit card payments on my site.

I found some modifications I could use on my website that I could easily install to allow my customers to use their credit cards through the more traditional type of merchant account, so I decided to sign up for one.

I should also mention that I had run into a chargeback problem with PayPal a short time before this and I was waiting for a final decision from PayPal with regard to how it would be handled.

Before I go on, let me explain for those who may not know what a chargeback is.

A chargeback can occur for a few different reasons, but the one I want to talk about today is as a result of a fraudulent transaction.

This is exactly what happened with the PayPal chargeback. Although the merchant companies are not willing to share all the details of these incidents, as far as I could tell, someone used a stolen credit number to make a purchase on my website.

As you might expect, the poor person whose card number was stolen gets a surprise when they receive their next credit card statement and finds a bunch of purchases on it that they did not make.

As far as I can tell, the first thing the merchant account company does during these situations is extract that money from the merchant. In this case, PayPal deducted the amount of the fraudulent transaction from my account.

In essence, the merchant, in this case, me, takes the loss. 100% of it. At least that is how the processes begins.

It was the first chargeback I had to deal with and up until that time I didn’t know a lot about how these things get worked out.

I was asked to provide as much information regarding the fraudulent transaction that I could come up with and pass it along to PayPal, which I did. They informed me that it could take a while before a final decision was made and there was a possibility that PayPal might even return the amount of the fraudulent transaction to our account.

I had heard a number of negative stories regarding PayPal’s merchant services over the years, but to be fair, I had never had any real problems with them. This fraudulent transaction was the first real problem, and at the time, I was not too happy about it. After all, who likes being ripped off?

The software I used on my website allowed for the simple addition of a payment processing module for a merchant account company known as “Secure Pay,” so that was the company I called to sign up for a merchant account and begin the process of making it easier for my customers to make a purchase on my website.

The fellow I talked to at “Secure Pay” said his name was Randy, and like most people who are trying to sell you something, he seemed very friendly.

During our conversation with Randy, I happened to mention my recent problem with a chargeback and how I was not sure how PayPal would end up handling it.

At this point, my new friend Randy assured me that his company (”Secure Pay”) stands behind their merchants and suggested that I would not have to worry about chargebacks. That was what I wanted to hear, and being a good salesman, Randy knew it.

After talking with Randy, I talked with the other people I needed to talk to in order to get my account set up and before long I had the proper software module installed on my website that would allow my customers to check out right on my website using their credit card. I wondered if business might even improve a bit since the new checkout process would be a lot faster and easier. Still, I decided to leave PayPal there as an option as well.

The new payment process seemed to be working fine. Business did not get any better as a result, but I was happy to know that the checkout process was faster and easier for my customers.

After a few months, I received a thick packet in the mail from my new merchant account company, who, by the way, seems to go by different names depending on what they are sending out.

For a while the statements I received from them were from a company calling itself “Merchant Services” which has since been changed to “Pipeline Data Processing.” With the addition of “Secure Pay,” that makes three names being used by this company, or perhaps it is really three separate companies that obviously have some connection to one another. Who knows.

Getting back to the thick packet I received, this one had some bad news for me. It was to inform me about my first chargeback. This one was about twice the amount of the one that came in through PayPal. Not a fortune by any stretch of the imagination, but again, who likes getting ripped off?

Again I was asked to provide as much information as I could regarding the transaction and once again I spent time looking up internet addresses and service providers and every other scrap of info I was able to find so I could send it back to “Secure Pay,” or whatever they call themselves.

A while later I got another letter in the mail from them to let me know that they had decided to go ahead and keep my money. I guess the information I sent them didn’t really do me much good at all. Although they did tell me I could dispute the chargeback.

Not being sure how it was I could dispute the chargeback other than hiring “Dog The Bounty Hunter” to track the crook down for them, I simply wrote them a letter with my side of the story. I made sure they understood exactly how I felt about the situation and how disappointed I was with their service. Especially after being told by Randy that they would stand behind me.

In retrospect, I wonder what that really meant. Because it sure didn’t mean that they were going to take the hit when a fraudulent transaction reared its ugly head. They wouldn’t even absorb part of the cost, which I thought would be kind of nice since it was their system, after all, that so willingly approved the transaction. Not to mention the credit card company (CitiBank) whose card was used to commit fraud.

But we all know how willing big multi-million (billion, perhaps?) companies are to part with their money.

In response to my letter, I got another letter from them advising me that my efforts in disputing the chargeback didn’t measure up and they would not be refunding the amount of the fraudulent transaction. Big surprise.

At this point I began to reconsider my decision to sign on with this particular merchant account company. And the more I thought about it, the less confidence I had in the security of their system.

The fraudulent transaction in this case was the result of a stolen credit card number since the paperwork I received regarding the chargeback contained a copy of an affidavit from the rightful owner of the credit card stating that the card was in his possession the entire time.

The transaction in question was as a result of a purchase that was made on my website using a name and address that was completely different from that of the rightful card owner. This is what they call “security?”

From what I could tell, the only valid information that was required to make a purchase through “Secure Pay” was a credit card number and the associated expiration date. The name and address, if my experience was any indication, did not matter at all and may as well have been “Mickey Mouse, Main Street, Disney World.” Apparently, it would have been processed by “Secure Pay” without any problem at all as long as the credit card number and expiration date were valid.

It was then that I remembered processing a credit card order over the phone a few weeks prior.

Most, if not all, merchant accounts provide a web site that merchants can log into to process a credit card order for a customer who would rather place their order over the phone.

During this particular transaction, I incorrectly typed in the name of the city where the customer lived and only noticed it after the order has been approved by the system. She actually lived in Sandusky, Ohio and I mistakenly typed in “Dandusky” which the system did not complain about at all. Pretty impressive security, don’t you think?

Which brings me back to PayPal. In contrast to my experience with “Secure Pay,” I had always found the PayPal system quite picky when it came to entering the correct data when placing an order. If a name was misspelled or a Zip Code was wrong, the system would not accept the order. At time time I thought it was a bit annoying, but as you might suspect, I now see that it was a good thing and could help reduce the number of fraudulent transactions.

Although I was far from being happy about the most recent chargeback, I had more-or-less resigned myself to the fact that it was a cost of doing business and was something I would just have to live with.

Until I got my statement in the mail a couple of days ago.

The merchant account company, who had decided to start calling itself “Pipeline Data Processing” for the first time I can recall, had revamped the format of their statement and it was now a lot easier to read and had a lot more information that the statements I had received previously which were printed on a single sheet of paper with very small print and very little detail regarding their fees and charges.

What an eye-opener this statement was! It became clear to me at this point that I was paying a LOT more for their services than I ever had to pay PayPal. And PayPal provided a better service if you ask me!

But that was not the best part! The best part was the line item I found in the transaction detail section where it showed the recent chargeback. To my surprise, this line item also included a mysterious $20.75 deduction under the “Fees” column. I wish I could have seen myself in the mirror when I first noticed it because my eyes probably almost popped out of my head!

Could it possibly be? Could they have charged ME $20.75 because some crook came to my website and ripped ME off? I was convinced that there had to be some other explanation so I called them on the phone to find out.

Sure enough, the nice lady on the phone confirmed for me that I was indeed being charged $20.75 due to the chargeback! Wow, is that service or is that service? In addition to losing the amount from the fraudulent transaction, I lose another $20 because I had to nerve to be victimized!

I get ripped off by someone using a stolen CitiBank credit card number that is processed through “Secure Pay” with no problem and I am the one that gets hit with an additional fee because of it?

Wow, I guess this is what it feels like to be victimized. Twice! Once by the crook who stole something from me and then again by a company whose salesman told me that they would stand behind me.

Gee whiz, if that is a good example of standing behind someone, I sure don’t want to know what it would be like if they weren’t standing behind me!

I told the nice lady on the phone that I would not be doing business with that company much longer and thanked her for her help. It was, after all, not her fault — she’s just trying to earn a living trying to explain away greed-inspired policies made by people making a lot more money than she is.

I am now in the process of upgrading the software on my website so that I will be able to use the new PayPal system to process credit cards right on my website. I will then cancel my account with “Secure Pay” and make a note to never do business with that company again. No matter which one of their three names they are using that day!

The real point of all my rambling here is to let you know who really takes the risk when it comes to using credit cards online.

Yes, someone surely pays the price for the millions of fraudulent transactions that must be processed online every year, but it is not the consumer.

That should make you feel a little more safe next time you worry about using your credit card to make a purchase online.

By the way, remember my PayPal chargeback? Well, it took them a month or two, but they eventually decided to credit the money back to my account, so I didn’t end up losing anything.

That leaves the current score as follows:

PayPal: 1

“Secure Pay:” 0

Bye, bye “Secure Pay.” You will not be missed.