The business-to-business focus of ID Analytics, Inc is going to be the perfect complement to the consumer-focused business model of LifeLock.  LifeLock is an identity theft protection company that helps to protect its customers by monitoring their credit activity.  If they find anything suspicious they alert their customers every time.

In 2002, ID Analytics, Inc was founded.  It is a company that will monitor credit applications for a different purpose.  This company will warn the issuers of credit like the retailers and banks if it appears that who is applying for credit is not who they might claim to be.

Taking both of these companies and the services that they offer their subscribers will be more useful and valuable when they are combined.  Combining or working together, LifeLock and ID Analytics, Inc will be able to help both the companies and consumers to manage their identity theft risk.  In order to finish the acquisition, LifeLock had to raise more than one hundred million dollars in venture capital.

By offering this new service to new and existing customers Equifax is hoping to help reduce the risk of this type of identity theft to families.  This service will help to protect the identities of the adults in the family plus their minor children in a very simple but effective dashboard that the parents can check at their convenience.  When a child’s identity is stolen it is usually when someone gets a piece of their personal information such as their Social Security number and then uses it to apply for a loan, a job, bank account, driver’s license, government benefits, credit card, and more.

Many times this type of identity theft is not discovered until the child becomes an adult and applies for a credit card, a loan, etc and gets turned down, or the parent gets calls from a collection agency about an unpaid bill.  When you enroll your child Equifax will begin to monitor their personal information for any existence of a credit file and then lock it so creditors cannot access their record as long as the child is enrolled.

When you sign up for this extra protection it will cost you almost thirty dollars a month but this is a small price to pay for peace of mind knowing that not only your identity is safe but so is your children’s.  For more information visit Equifax’s website.

One benefit is that by using this service it will help to protect your credit rating, and maybe even improve it, by keeping you informed as to what is being reported in your credit files.  When you choose to use this type of service they will watch for any suspicious changes on your accounts such as new loans just applied for, credit card applications, change of address, and others.  Identity thieves have many ways to steal your identity so when you use a credit monitoring service you are getting up-to-date technology to help keep you from becoming a victim of fraud and identity theft.

It does not directly protect you from identity theft because it is not have the ability to keep your personal information out of the hands of identity thieves or keep them from using it.  It just alerts you if something does not look right on your credit report.  By using credit monitoring services you will get emails to let you know instantly that something is not right with your credit report so you can send a fraud alert to the three credit bureaus about the incident.  These alerts will prevent further damage to your credit rating.  If you were monitoring your credit reports yourself you may not find out about this fraudulent attempt for several weeks or longer.  By that time, your credit score could drop and your identity has been stolen.

Using a credit monitoring service will also give you an extra layer of protection to people who do business with companies that have suffered security breaches or have been victims of identity before themselves.  When you place a fraud alert on your credit report, they are good for ninety days and then they can be renewed.  You may have to also provide a police report in order to get this extension.  You will need to add extensions because once the fraud alert is lifted they can open accounts in your name again.

Yes, there is a catch when you use a credit monitoring service which is the monthly fee.  The fee that you pay each month is a small price to pay for peace of mind knowing that your credit report is being monitored twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and three hundred sixty-five days a year for pennies a day.

Receipts

When you got your receipt from merchants before 2006, they printed your credit card numbers on them.  Now it is illegal to this but there are times when they still do it especially if the merchant uses one of the old carbon credit card machines.  The new cash registers today still print the expiration date and last four numbers of the card which can be enough for another case of identity theft.

For Identity protection and credit protection make sure that you keep track of your receipts until you can shred them and make sure that you do not leave them in the bag with your purchase or after you take what you bought out of the bag.  Do not throw the receipts in public trash receptacles or in your trash can.  Treat them just like you would any other personal information, including your credit card.

Lurkers at an ATM

It is just common sense to use cash if at all possible because it cannot be duplicated like your credit card number can.  When you stop at an ATM machine make sure that no one is standing too close while you are using the machine.  If they are, do not use the machine or let them use the machine first. Today there are cell phones that are video and camera-enabled so there is a good possibility that this person is recording your ATM pin number.  Then all they have to do is grab your card and have access to your bank account.  If you do decide to use it when there is someone behind you, use your body to block their view of your transactions and the numbers you are putting in.

These are just two ways that many people do not think of that identity thieves can use to steal your personal information and use it against you to get new credit cards, obtain a job, clean out your bank account, or run up lots of charges on your credit card.

Elderly people are more likely to fall for a scam that is called equity stripping.  If you have equity built up in your home but do not have much cash or income they could become a target of an abusive lender who will try to convince them that they can get a loan if they just pad their income even if you cannot afford the payment.  Many times the scammer is so persuasive that they can talk them into applying for the loan.  Once they get the loan the lender just waits for them to default on the payment so they can foreclose on the house, and strip the elderly of all the equity they have taken years to build up.

This scammer does not just target the elderly but anyone that has a home with equity built up in it.  Why they target the elderly is that most of them have owned their home for many years and have a lot of equity built up.

There are even some lenders that will offer to save you from foreclosure if you have fallen behind on your payments and the way that they do this is by offering to refinance your mortgage for a lower monthly payment.  One of the reasons that the payments are lower is because the payments are for the interest only with a balloon payment due at one time of the total amount borrowed.  The lender will foreclose on your house if you cannot refinance your loan or pay back the total amount borrowed.

To avoid being but in either situation, having your home foreclosed on, and becoming a victim of a scammer, do not agree to a loan that you know that you cannot afford to make the payments.

And if that was not bad enough, a list of the emails of the users of this pornographic site and their passwords are already circulating online in plain text.  This list has approximately sixty-four thousand passwords.  In addition, it has been publicly looked over, analyzed, and publicized.  The pornographic website, YouPorn, is one the top one hundred visited websites on the internet which makes this a high profile security breach.

It is also an embarrassing security breach for many of the users because many of them probably do not want to be associated with a pornography site publicly.  The lesson that anyone, whether you are a user of this or any pornography site, is that you should not use the same credentials to login in for multiple sites.  If you want to use the services of this type of website, get a different email address, login, and password for identity theft protection that would not easily identify you.  This way you would not be publicly embarrassed if a security breach happened.

The investigation started out as investigating loan sharking by the mafia and then it began to expand as the prosecutors used computer and telephone intercepts to uncover the illegal activity evidence around the Treasury bonds.  These fake securities were worth approximately a third more of the national debt in the United States.  In January they were taken were from a trust company in Switzerland.  All six trillion dollars work of fake Treasury bonds were in three big trunks.

The fake Treasury bonds were going to be used to attempt to defraud many banks in Switzerland.  Experts from the United States lent their expertise to identify them as fake Treasury bonds.  The prosecutor from Potenza stated that an international operating network in several countries was behind the fake Treasury bonds.  On a website from the Italian daily Corriere della Sera they cited sources from the prosecutor’s office that the network was thought to be interested in getting plutonium.

Using videos from the police, they showed pictures of the trunks with Federal Reserve System, Treaty of Versailles stamped in big letters that were gold on the sides of the trunks.  The video also showed bond certificates that were marked Chicago, Illinois, Federal Reserve Bank plus.

The men who were arrested are being accused of credit card  forgery, identity theft, loan sharking, and counterfeiting bonds.  They were operating in the regions of Italy of Piedmont, Basilicata, Lombardy, and Lazio.

Microsoft replied with a message of their own on Monday saying that the “Microsoft Store India is currently unavailable.”  Microsoft is working to get the site back up as fast as they can. The customers who have used the store recently have been sent guidance on the issues along with suggestions for immediate actions according to a spokesperson for Microsoft.

This same group also said they were responsible for a hacking attack on a law firm’s website in Virginia for a United States Marine who was convicted in an attack in Haditha, Iraq in 2005 of twenty-four unarmed civilians.  These attacks happened after the group Anonymous published a recording of a phone call between Scotland Yard and the FBI early on Wednesday morning.

On Friday, the Justice Ministry in Greece took down their site after a video posted by activists who claimed to be Cypriot and Greek members of the group Anonymous was display for a couple of hours. In a message on the website of the police department of Boston the group Anonymous stated that the site had been attacked hacked many months ago.  During this attack hundreds of password was made public to retaliate because of what they considered brutality police used against the demonstrators of Occupy Boston.

Occupy Boston had made camp for a couple of months this past fall in the financial district and after the police had one hundred forty-one demonstrators on October 11th, ten days later the first hacker attack happened.  On December 10th, because of safety and public health concerns the camp was dismantled.

In Salt Lake City, their website was still down on Friday and there are possible criminal charges being considered.  This attack is being blamed on Anonymous being opposed to a bill regarding anti-graffiti paraphernalia that failed in the Senate. If this bill had passed, it would have been illegal to have in your possession any type of instrument, device, or tool that would have been used to use graffiti to vandalize an area.

These types of social network sites are used as a popular portal for identity thieves for befriending un-suspecting members. After befriending them they began to monitor their information to see what personal information they can use to steal your identity.  You need to make sure that your teenager knows to limit the amount of personal information that they list on their profile pages.  They should not put their birth date, where they work if they are working, or their address.  By not putting this information on their profiles will make it hard for identity thieves to get enough information to steal your identity.

Sooner or later your teenager will be heading off to college so you need to make sure that they know how to protect their identity when they are living in the dorm.  They should be aware of the people around them and be careful of what personal information or  they share with them for credit protection.  Make sure that there is a bank near the school where they can get a safe deposit box in which to store their birth certificate and social security card plus their immunization records and anything else they do need all the time that has their personal information on it.  You should also remind them to keep their dorm door locked and to keep their computer safe by password protecting it.

Most parents will either give their teenager a credit card to use in case of an emergency or let them get one in their name.  Show them how to review their credit card statement each month and tell them to make sure that they safe card the credit card.  You should also tell them how much damage an identity thief can do if they get hold of their credit card and you should also make sure that you advise them not to lend the card to anyone.

Talk to your teenager about identity theft and the consequences of it so they will know how to protect themselves from becoming a victim.