Reports by Consumers

HSBC says the data lost is not considered sensitive to the point of putting customer bank accounts at risk. Are they kidding? Armed with this knowledge it is pretty easy to ‘break’ over the phone call in security measures.

But there’s a Russian bank called Expobank which is doing things the other way round. It recently released a calendar, as most people sometimes do before the start of a year, featuring some of their female banking staff in various degrees of undress.

Here we go again. This is part of the identity theft problem. You can do all you want about keeping your data out of the hands of thieves. You can shred all your documents. You burn any unused or used credit cards. But you can’t do security for retailers that you frequent. TJX is the parent company of some successful retail chains like TJ Maxx. This past spring, TJX had 45 million credit card and debit card customer numbers stolen. You read that right - 45 million.

My bank did one of its regular mail-outs to advertise its life insurance scheme. As anyone will tell you, if you put text in front of me I’ll read it, so Sharon was startled when I burst out laughing reading an insurance form…

Not that this is a huge surprise, but 36% of young adults say that they prefer making their financial transactions online, the most of any method, according to a new report.

Online shoppers abandon shopping carts for a variety of reasons. They may balk at a shipping charge or total price of multiple items. They might encounter problems entering credit card information or perceive the checkout process as too long. In the online world, it’s not as easy to recover a sale when a customer interacts with a screen and can exit with a click of a mouse. But it’s not impossible. An interesting study by Marketing Experiments on using email follow ups to save sales from abandoned carts gives some insight on how.

So, as I mentioned in my last post, Mario and I spent most of the day going through our bills (namely credit cards) to see which ones we could consolidate with the new, low interest rate credit card Mario got. We decided we’d pay off Home Depot, JC Penny, our JC Penny personal plan, which is how we got our wedding rings last year; Sears and the dreaded Capital One card. The only cards we’d have left would be Target and the new Visa.

As for the extended warranty, that’s really a judgment call. I’ve never had need to use one on a desktop product, but on portable devices that take a lot of abuse, it’s often a prudent measure. It’s worth checking your credit card policy, though. American Express, for example, double the standard warranty on any product purchased with their cards. That can save you a lot of money and get you the same kind of coverage.

There are a lot of credit card choices out there, whether for business or personal use. Choosing a business credit card is an important decision because there are many factors and features to consider.

2. Reduce your debt. Generally speaking, lenders look for a total debt load of no more than 36 percent of income. Since this figure includes your mortgage, which typically ranges between 25 percent and 28 percent of income, you need to get the rest of installment debt—car loans, student loans, revolving balances on credit cards—down to between 8 percent and 10 percent of your total income.

At the risk of becoming a clone of ThisIsBroken, here’s another fun e-mail I got today. This one is from Citibank’s ThankYou network - a point reward system for using their financial products.

The incentives they offer to customers in good standing, as well as their helpfulness over the phone, make them one of the less painful bureaucracies I’ve had to deal with in the process of paying for this godawful expensive education of mine. So I was annoyed a month or so ago to get a letter informing me that one of my loans was one of the first batch sold off to Sallie Mae. The explanation at the time seemed good (to fund new scholarship programs), but this Trib investigation casts some doubt on it.

The FTC has released a rather massive set of statistics relating to fraud in their report; Consumer Fraud and Identity Theft Data January - December 2006. The section regarding Internet related fraud shows some marked increases compared to 2005.

Heather, I once worked in the fraud department of a major Aussie credit card bank. We saw 9 frauds a day and not one hit the news. On eBay 75,000 new people sign up every day. Sure there’s frauds but there’s steps you can take to reduce the risk too.

Yes, I guess this is a week of leverage for me. Earlier I was writing about how to finance your furniture…now, finance your domain name.

Write to your elected officials if you feel you’ve been barred from getting employment or renting an apartment due to a credit check. With outsourcing, down sizing, even the left over Dot.Com crash, there’s a lot of good workers being discriminated against due to their credit rating.

My work has a benefits probationary period of 120 days… that’s finally done, so today I signed up for my benefits. I didn’t need medical because we have opted to do that/offer that through the web company, so I got dental for the family, vision for myself (I think I’m going to start wearing 20/40 contacts instead of occasional glasses), additional group life insurance (work pays for a really small one, plus I have a ridiculous Universal Variable indepently) and cancer insurance.

Christmas shopping 2006 officially ended at 1:45 this afternoon in the parking lot of Patriot Square with the car trunk closing on yet another holiday buying season. I can almost hear the daily interest charges growing on my credit card - it sounds something like a balloon being inflated toward its bursting point.

Christmas 2006 update: I hate thinking this is an 'evergreen article' but my mother-in-law who is nearly 90 just had her identity stolen and is now making sure she shreds all her paperwork before discarding. With the shopping frenzy of the holidays, the risk to consumers for identity theft is particularly high this time of year.

In a speech from 2003 (before the one quoted in the materials packet) Julie Williams of the OCC made some comments about the changing circumstances in which credit decisions are made, which help to put the predatory lending issue in context:

This is a simple life insurance premium calculator built in c language, basically it calculate's a 10% increment in your premium every year and the total amount of money you will be paying every year on your premium and also increase the final payout by 10% every year when your premium goes up by 10%

Privacy has had a rough go of it this week. What with all the Facebooking, HP spying, and Craigslist sex baiting, it’s a miracle there’s not more identity theft than there already is. Now pile on top of that a security breach in an online video game called Second Life, and you’ve got more than enough stories to make even the beginning web user take a second look at what they’re doing online.

Instead, the market is actually fragmenting into different sectors - Kelkoo and PriceRunner are leading the way in electronics, MoneySupermarket in financial products, Confused.com in insurance, while entertainment has no obvious big names at all.

I had a weird experience today with a banker. My customer wanted to use her own bank so we sent a buyers order for the Dodge Stratus that She picked out.

Its been a few years since structured financial products have been on the rise. Structured notes protect the capital that is invested for a number of years, caps the maximum interest each year. A good alternative to bonds, since canadian bonds have not been doing so well due to higher interest rates. Structures notes enable the investor to expose his portfolio to the stockmarket without too much risk.

Will be interesting to see how the market for weather derivatives develops. The range of applications for these products is endless. Thanks, John, for this site on these financial products.

The Veterans Affairs Department says it is not necessary for veterans to contact financial institutions or cancel credit cards and bank accounts in case of identity theft. Here is what veterans can do to protect themselves:

Someone I work with just recently found out she's pregnant. She's 18. She is neither emotionally or financially ready, and she just bought a $27,000 car. Meanwhile she seems to barely pay her rent. Situations like this baffle me. Even more shocking is when she said she would try to get as many credit cards as she could to build credit. It doesn't take a scholar or financial guru to realize she's going to land herself in a deep hole. Sadly, too many people are like this.

Of course it doesn’t help that I’ve been getting stuff in the mail addressed to me saying things like “On your next birthday, why not give the gift to your family and buy life insurance” or the one asking me to join AARP! giggle. Ok it’s kind of funny. Somewhere there is a hugs place that does nothing but track people’s 50th birthdays and sells the info to places like those, so I can get stuff like that.

Imagine going through a tramatic period in yout life and turning to a service which you thought was confidential, only to find your personal data and details of your personal crisis being stolen on a tiny disk. That data could be used against you either through identity theft, blackmail, or even just suddenly appear on a website somewhere.

So, in a world where the US faces over $67 Billion in cybercrime and $52 Billion in identity theft, the US is budgeting $265 Million to the Justice Department for cybercrime while total US spending for fighting the "war on drugs" totalled over $6 Billion.

I recently read an article in the Washington Post discussing, an issue facing many individuals today, credit cards. The article describes a birthday party in which the guest of honor recieved, at age 11 no less, a prepaid credit card. Understandably the author and her husband, denied their young daughter’s request for a credit card of her own. When the author goes on to state that it is equally as irresponsible to give a credit card to a high school or college aged young adult that I begin to question her rationale. It got me to thinking about what constitutes a sound financial upbringing.

The one gaping hole I note, and you can drive a train through it, is that they don’t make any real effort to address how many passwords and PINs we need to maintain. Consider how many different systems you log in to from home.Especially if you pay bills online. Ten? Twenty? More? Now think about work. How many more? Identity management is a hot topic, and for good reason.

Joel P. Bruckenstein at Morningstar wrote an excellent article on what Fidelity are doing with their Fidelity Labs initiative. I’d encourage you to read it but in a nutshell, they have taken inspiration from Google Labs to set up a unit that experiments with applying new technologies to their core business of distributing retail financial products and services.

I’ll be picking up a 1 ton “cube van” at 8am and bringing it to the Chilliwack house to load up all our big stuff. It should all pretty easily fit into the truck so it should only take one trip. We’re still not sure if we’re bringing our couches as we’ve been offered a super deal from one of the new tenants who works at The Brick. If we leave the old couch/loveseat for them he’ll get us his employee cost for a replacement (new) set. We’re not totally sure we will, even if we find something we like. It’s a bit of money at an already expensive time of the year for us. The deal is great though, so we might just be maxing out the credit card to make it happen.

Net dollars invested into variable annuities dropped nearly 50% in 2005 over the prior year, in what I hope is a sign that investors are finally wising up to the oppressive taxation, numbing complexity, and crushing costs associated with most of these products. Such annuities essentially wrap mutual funds inside (often-unneeded) life insurance, and expose investors to taxation at levels as high as 300%+ over those for more straightforward investments.

Despite increased consumer awareness, the identity theft business is alive and well, according to Eric Sites, a research engineer at Sunbelt. Sites is one of the leading authorities on the Cool Web Search family of malware, and has spent the past few months researching a ring of identity theft Trojans. In an interview for my new podcast, OnSecurity, Eric said that identity thieves may only be limited by their ability to sift through the mountain of data they are harvesting. In just one example, he recently downloaded more than 80 Gbytes of stolen data that had been aggregated from one variant of an identity theft trojan.

So apparently CardSystems, the company responsible for the biggest compromise of consumer credit card data in history, has settled with the Federal Trade Commission. From the eWeek article, “FTC Settles with CardSystems Over Data Breach“:

Last week I ran down to Huntsville, AL to my old ISSA Chapter. We had a great luncheon presentation on Identity Theft. At the presentation I found out the Alabama Attorney General Troy King put together a wonder primer on ID Theft, what to do if you are a victim, contact tracking forms, phone numbers etc. Here is a link to his primer. I hope you never have to use it but it can really make a stressful situation a little better if you do.

There's a lot more on ID cards on the No2ID site and in Phil's speech, particularly on the potential introduction of a surveillance state - very scary stuff. And if you don't think it affects you personally them, as Phil says, consider this: why do you have net curtains? Would you be happy for the government to take them away forever (and allow others to peer in)? This is worse, a lot worse. It'll make identity theft easier, not harder, just from a common sense point of view (lots of your personal data, stored in one easy place for criminals to get at the database via the Net or simply through one of the government employees who will be able to access your info - you think of those hundreds of thousands of people not one of them could ever be bribed or persuaded?)

Between bites of pizza, Dale told us that he had gotten "stuck" on our blog for quite some time Tuesday afternoon. Sure enough, he seemed pretty up to date on all of the ins and outs of our lives, and was even citing details from some of our archived posts. (He must really have gotten stuck.) At some point the conversation turned away from the specifics of certain blog entries and veered toward a somewhat philosophical (and, at times, nonsensical) discussion about the purpose of our blog. Dale asked why we write the blog, and commented, I can't believe you tell the world so much about yourselves...I mean, aren't you worried about telling people so much? As with many things Dale says, I wasn't sure, even by the end of the night, how many meanings were buried in this comment. Did he mean aren't we worried about the emotional vulnerability of disclosing details about such things as the fodder of our occasional marital speedbumps to friends and strangers? Or did he mean the more simple concern of telling so many people so many things about us, leaving us vulnerable to such things as identity theft? Or is there yet some other concern I've not considered?

I wanted to upgrade the RAM in my laptop from 1 GB to 2 GB and I looked for the cheapest deal I could find on the Internet. I came across ECost.com and I found the Kingston memory for $30 cheaper than I could buy it directly from the manufacturer. So, I ordered the memory as the website said it was "in stock". I pay for the 2 chips and chose the option for overnight delivery. A few hours later I checked the status of the order and it said the items were backordered. I called ECost and could not get a hold of anyone. I sent an email which was not replied to for over 24 hours. Finally, after 2 days, I got them to release the hold on my credit card and cancel the order.

Anyway, I just hate it when large corporations prey on the poor, who can least afford to be "taken" by such schemes. I fully realize that there will be a sentiment that it's their own fault for not having good credit, but I don't buy that, at least not in every case. People have a bad credit history for a number of reasons, including cases of identity theft that the victim was unaware of until they applied for some type of utility service.

Alarm bells didn’t start to ring until we got to the part where he asked if I have a credit card. Hmmm… why, oh why, would the phone company care if I have a credit card? I asked him why he need to know this bit of information and he said that he doesn’t need to know the number. Fine, yes. Mastercard or Visa? I answered, all this time thinking that maybe I should have said no, that I’ve lived all my life on top of a mountain and have no need for a rectangular piece of plastic as a mode of payment. Next, he asked how many people would be living in the house and what sort of work I do. Again, I gave my answer. I have a nasty feeling that I was being profiled for those telemarketers who’d be calling this new phone line soon.

In my household, I handle the money and the bills. I am sure that all of you reading this post are truly shocked at that news flash! My wife does not really like to mess with it – the investments, the retirement plans, the college savings plans, the credit card bills, etc…So I take care of it all.

Global Advertising Strategies says ethnic minority spending spending on financial products and services will increase by 94% in next 4 years. More than 13% of the 105 mln households in the United States do not have any banking services. Among Americans who do not bank are immigrants, ethnic minorities, the youth, widows, divorcees without credit histories in their own names, and people who have filed for bankruptcy and are re-building their credit-worthiness.

While I am a Certified Financial Planner, I no longer serve individual clients. I do give financial planning seminars and the occasional speech, but I don'’t sell financial products. If you’re a member of the public and looking for an advisor I recommend visiting the Financial Planners Standards Council, where you can search for a qualified planner by city or postal code.

Fannie Mae “provides financial products and services that make it possible for low-, moderate-, and middle-income families to buy homes of their own,” according to their website.

They have a lender search tool that lets you search the Fannie Mae-approved lenders by state.

It’s also worth mentioning the hypocrisy of AARP’s deriding diversified bond and stock investment as too “risky” in other ads, while at the same time profiting by putting its brandname on various investment funds of its own. AARP sells 38 mutual funds, and makes north of $300 million annually by such co-branding of financial products.

All major tax preparation firms do offer e-file, but “rapid refunds” and similar products (yes, as in financial products) are really just high-interest loans. Here’s how it works.

Customers earn points towards the purchase or lease of GM vehicles, and GM says more than 4 million GM cars have been bought or leased by Rewards customers since the card was launched.

Users in the UK with an existing online banking relationship are more likely to use the Internet for a range of financial activities. 70 percent of online banking users versus 52 percent of online users pay their bills online. 37 percent versus 30 percent of online users have applied for a loan or a credit card online and 33 percent versus 27 percent of online users have bought insurance products online.

However, online mortgage applications tend to be low even among online banking users. Only 4 percent of them have applied for a mortgage online. The complexity and the financial commitment involved with a mortgage refrain also more experienced users to adopt the online channel for these types o financial products.

Consumers whose private information may have been put at risk due to the recent security breaches at ChoicePoint now have a new consumer information and action center available at www.ChoicePointClassAction.com. The website will feature up to the minute news on the ChoicePoint case as well as the pending Choicepoint litigation.

“The ChoicePoint class action site is designed to continually update those consumers who may have been affected by the security breaches at ChoicePoint,” said Leonard Bennett, lead counsel for the ChoicePoint class. “Our goal is to provide the latest news and information to those consumers who are members of the ChoicePoint class and point them to resources for coping with the effects of identity theft.”

With more people than ever before applying for new loans and refinancing, an easy-to-understand guide has become a necessity for anyone confused by the complicated issues at stake. Mortgages 101 answers all the questions readers typically have, detailing all the latest changes in mortgage processes, and showing readers how to save money by:* understanding important terms like ARMs and Hybrids -- and what's in the fine print * improving their credit scores to increase their borrowing power* using technology to ...

I'm bummed - it looks like I won't be able to get insurance for my Sidekick. Apparently you have to sign up within seven days of activation (for new customers) or ten days after switching phones (for existing customers), and I didn't know that when I bought the Sidekick on eBay. I didn't even know that insurance was recommended, but every website or discussion forum I've seen about Sidekicks has people mentioning broken scroll wheels, buttons falling off, etc. I ...

When I decided to cancel the service, I found that they had no listed toll-free number, and the documents they sent me did not provide any information towards that goal. After googling and contacting them, they provided a long-distance number for customer support. I did not use that, and instead asked to be transferred from the only toll-free number they have.

Upon being transferred, I was promptly left hanging no less than 4 times for periods of more than ...

LAST YEAR WE REPORTED THAT THE CONSUMER GROUP US PIRG FOUND ERRORS IN 4-OUT-OF-5 CREDIT REPORTS. WE FOUND ERRORS WHEN WE INVESTIGATED TOO. SHERRIE McGREGOR FOUND 91-THOUSAND DOLLARS WORTH OF ERRORS IN HER CREDIT REPORT. TABITHA JACKSON'S CREDIT REPORT CONTAINED PHANTOM ACCOUNTS AND NON-EXISTENT COLLECTION AGENCY ACTIONS. THAT'S WHY INCORRECT "SPECIALTY CONSUMER REPORT" INFORMATION NEEDS TO BE CHECKED.

A landlord might check a data base that shows which consumers skipped out on rent. And they might think it's you ...

Prepaid credit cards are a good way to teach kids how to use credit cards responsibly. Here's one example.

Hello Kitty will turn more plastic than ever by staring on a MasterCard debit card.

"We think our target age group will be from 10 to 14, although it could certainly go younger," said Bruce Giuliano from Sanrio.

Since only parents (or at least anyone older than 18) can sign up for the card, Hello Kitty thinks it's a great way for adults to "help teach their children how to manage their finances." Next up, is a ...

Sub-prime lendors sometimes target financially strapped home owners for predatory mortgage refinancing, a practice in which homeowners are pressured to refinance their mortgage with a loan that has excessive points, fees, penalties of interest rates. Most mortgage brokers do not use these tactics. For those who do, certain states have begun to take action.

Joining a growing number of states in the battle against predatory mortgage lending, Massachusetts enacted a strong anti-predatory lending law earlier this week. The new law passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and with the endorsement of both mortgage industry trade groups and consumer and civil rights advocates.

Among the law’s significant provisions:

Triggers strong consumer protections for loans with fees greater than 5%. The law establishes a comprehensive definition of points and fees to remove the incentive ...