mardi 8 mars 2011

shaw capital management:Internet sales scams lead list of complaints to IC3: Plain Dealing

There were some strange online scams in 2010.
Like this one: Consumers complained their cell and landline phones were bombarded with nuisance calls (dead air, recorded messages) to the point changed their phone number. The scam was tracked to con artists who accesessed victims’ financial and brokerage accounts and then used the calls to victims’ phones to block financial institutions from checking with victims to verify online requests to change phone numbers or addresses on the accounts.
That peek at emerging scams was included in the Internet Computer Crime Center’s latest report of internet crimes. IC3 collects consumer complaints about internet scams, analyzes them and alerts local, state and federal agencies.
The crimes that drained consumers’ wallets in 2010 often involved failure to pay for or deliver merchandise sold or bought online, identity theft, auction fraud and credit card fraud.
Consumers ran into fake rentals online. They got collection calls for payday loans taken out with their Social Security numbers – by someone else.
And, of course, there were plenty of fake check scams, online rental scams and phony pleas for help from friends allegedly trapped overseas.
Online fraud is an equal opportunity crime.
IC3 said victims of online scams are as likely to be men as they are women. And victims also are split fairly evenly across generations.
As for the country where scams against Americans are most likely to originate: the U.S.A is number one.

shaw capital management:Student Financial Aid: Six Scams and Myths

When you’re hoping for some help to pay forcollege you’ll be in the crosshairs of scam artists looking to take advantage of your vulnerability.
Tuition assistance, in the form of scholarships, is not only hard to get — but competition can be fierce when annual tuition bills can run upward of $50,000 a year. The desire to get financial help for that pursuit means consumers need to be on guard when opportunities appear to present themselves.
So, Consumer Ally is sharing a list of scams and myths about student financial aid that New York officials compiled to help families avoid falling victim to scammers.
Use common sense and be on the lookout for these six scams and myths tied to college financial aid, thanks to the New York State Higher Education Services Corporation.
Scams
  • Credit Card Scams: Financial aid advisers warn against giving your credit card information to any fee-based, scholarship-finding service that claims it needs them up front. You may be setting yourself up for unauthorized charges, even identity theft. Get information about the agency’s services in writing, and don’t buy into reasons such as: the agency needs a credit card number to “hold” your scholarship.
  • Inside Information: Officials say there are no secret sources of federal or state student aid, so don’t pay for services that purport to have access to it.
  • Guaranteed Success (for a fee): If a scholarship-finding agency tells you that they can guarantee success for a fee, that’s a story that’s probably too good to be true. On the sponsor side, financial aid officials warn that legitimate scholarship sponsors do not guarantee an award because you paid them a fee.
Myths
  • The Secret Federal Formula: Paying someone to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid probably won’t get you better results, officials say. Funding via the FAFSA is based on financial need and expected family contribution. Financial aid advisers say that awards, based on this information, are the same no matter who does the work.
  • Unclaimed Scholarship Dollars: This myth implies that you might be able to scoop up funding that others have left on the table. However, officials say that about 85% of what is typically described as “unclaimed” scholarship dollars actually consists of employee-paid education benefits, not generally available funds.
  • You Have to Be An “A” Student: It certainly helps to earn those “A”s, especially in the case of academic scholarships, but financial aid officials remind applicants that scholarships also exist for community and extracurricular activities, skills and talents.
For more tips and advice, start with the U.S. Department of Education’s student aidwebsite and consult your state’s website to see what other student financial aid services might be available to your family.

shaw capital management: Internet swindlers grow more sophisticated

By Claudia Buck
McClatchy Newspapers
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — For Sacramento grandmother Pat Blucher, it was a financial plea she couldn’t resist. A few weeks ago, her distraught granddaughter called from Canada, saying she’d been arrested on drug charges and needed bail money. Immediately.
Only it wasn’t her granddaughter, but someone setting a financial trap. It’s an old scam but with a newer twist: Facebook.
Using details apparently pulled from Facebook pages, the scam artist peppered the conversation with enough family facts — husband’s and baby’s names, a girlfriend’s wedding — to persuade Blucher to wire $4,600 to Canada.
“They’re so clever. They had all the information to fool me,” said Blucher, a retired teacher who’s convinced the Facebook page gave the caller access to too many personal details about her family.
The incident is yet another example of a classic cybercrime — using the Internet to foist financial fraud on unwitting victims.
From the “I Love You” computer worm in 2000 to last year’s “stranded traveler” swindles, online scams have been around since the Internet’s dawn. But they have become increasingly sophisticated and lucrative.
Last year, the Internet Crime Complaint Center, which is affiliated with the FBI, logged its 2 millionth consumer complaint, a number that’s doubled in about three years.
From 2000 through 2009, total financial losses due to Internet crimes were roughly $1.7 billion, according to the IC3, with a median dollar loss of more than $500 per complaint.
A new study, “A Good Decade for Cybercrime,” released in January by security-software company McAfee Labs, details how Internet crime has morphed from merely malicious to financially devastating.
Back in 2000, Internet fraud was relatively benign. Hackers sought bragging rights by cracking codes and worming their way into government and business-computer networks in order to cause mischief. But by 2003, the motive had turned to money.
“Since then it’s almost exclusively about finances,” such as stealing bank account information or conning people into wiring funds, said Dave Marcus, security research director for McAfee Labs.
And the millions of users hanging out online via social- networking accounts are increasingly vulnerable, he said. “Because of the sheer volume of people on Twitter and Facebook, it’s a very fertile target group.”
Among the more recent scams: fake requests for password resets or logins. Fraudsters also comb social-networking sites looking for popular topics or seasonal subjects to set their traps.
“You’ll see Twitter bombarded with IRS stuff when it’s tax season or fake romance scams around Valentine’s Day,” Marcus said.
Last July, midway through the summer travel season, the Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, warned of “stranded traveler” scams, where fake e-mails or Facebook messages go out, supposedly from friends saying they’ve been robbed and need cash in a hurry to pay a hotel bill or return to the United States.
Vulnerability to cybercrime comes partly from our eagerness to share so much of ourselves and increasingly conduct more of our financial transactions — from banking to shopping — online, say Marcus and other security experts.
“Cyber criminals will use any publicly available information, including from social-networking sites, to extort victims … to steal your money or cause financial harm to your business,” said FBI special agent Tom Osborne.
His advice for Facebook and Twitter users: “Avoid accepting unknown friend requests and only post information you would want your Mom or Dad to read.” Likewise, avoid opening e-mails from unknown individuals and never click on photos or hyperlinks in those e-mails.
The California Office of Privacy Protection also urges vigilance online.
Among Marcus’ recommendations: Be familiar with your mobile devices. Keep your privacy settings high on social-networking sites.
If you’re using a cellphone, turn off the GPS when it’s not in use “so you’re not broadcasting where your device — and you — are located.” If doing online banking from a cellphone, be sure your access is password-protected.
And if you do get snagged, report the crime.
Blucher, who contacted the local Better Business Bureau, the California Attorney General’s Office and local police after her Canadian scam, said getting snared by fraudsters alerted her to the prevalence of online crime.
“If something good can come of this, it’s that more people can be aware … so they don’t get scammed and lose their hard-earned money like I did.”

shaw capital management:Internet Fraud Declined in 2010

While welcome, the primary cause of the dip after years of steady increases was probably the overall decline in retail activity that accompanied a weak economy, said Greg Donewar, the manager of IC3. The complaint figures show a strong correlation with the dip in retail sales and the bottoming of the recession, he said. “The unemployment rate stayed above 9 percent for the nation, so there was less money for commerce of any sort.”
Indeed, complaints were down for several major scams related to e-commerce, including online-auction fraud, credit-card fraud and so-called overpayment fraud, in which a scammer using a bad check overpays for a rental or some other item and gets the recipient to send them a good check with the difference. However, complaints about nondelivery of merchandise or payments rose  9 percent to about 43,700, pushing this type of scam to the No. 1 spot on IC3’s list for the year.
Complaints about identity theft, computer crime and frauds involving things like bogus work-at-home offers and sweepstakes also increased last year.
It seems likely there will be a return to an upward trend in fraud complaints as the economy improves. Yet there may be some longer-lasting forces for good at work, Mr. Donewar and others say. There’s more awareness about online fraud among consumers. Financial institutions and payment processors have gotten more aggressive in their use of antifraud technologies, and retailers are improving security around customer data.
“They’re doing a better job with better tools,” says Adam Chernichaw, a privacy and technology lawyer at White & Case. Fraud is being kept at bay and being detected earlier, he said.
No doubt, criminals will work to adapt to all these defenses. Indeed, there is no sign that the battle against online crime is being won. On the contrary, the IC3 report shows it has become more pervasive, affecting people in all demographic groups and all across the country. Complaints from women, once fewer and less severe, have nearly caught up with complaints from men. Young and old are all well represented, with people ages 40 to 59 now submitting the most complaints.
“It’s a natural result of the ubiquity of technology in this era,” says Mr. Chernichaw. “Now everybody’s on.”

shaw capital management: Our Biggest Financial Firms Don’t Scam

1. In mid-2006, Bear Stearns induced investors to purchase, and Ambac as a financial guarantor to insure, securities that were backed by a pool of mortgage loans that in the words of the Bear Stearns deal manager was a SACK OF SHIT.1 Within the walls of its sparkling new office tower, Bear Stearns executives knew this derogatory and distasteful characterization aptly described the transaction. Indeed, Bear Stearns haddeliberately and secretly altered its policies and neglected its controls to increase the volume of mortgage loans available for its securitizations made in patent disregard for the borrowers ability to repay those loans. After the market collapse exposed its scheme to sell defective loans to investors through these transactions, JP Morgan executives assumed control over Bear Stearns and implemented an across-the-board strategy to improperly bar EMC from honoring its contractual promises to disclose and repurchase defective loans through a series of deceptive practices. In what amounts to accounting fraud, JP Morgans bad-faith strategy was designed to avoid and has avoided recognition of the vast off-balance sheet exposure relating to its contractual repurchase obligations thereby enabling JPMorgan Chase & Co. to manipulate its accounting reserves and allowing its senior executives to continue to reap tens of millions of dollars in compensation following the taxpayer-financed acquisition of Bear Stearns.
Oh, maybe they did.
At least that’s what the lawsuit claims.
It’s especially nice when you make crap loans and then short the companies you intentionally lay off the bad paper on, knowing they’ll blow up in advance. And that’s alleged too:
24. Knowing that its fraudulent and breaching conduct was resulting and would continue to result in grave harm to Ambac, Bear Stearns then implemented a trading strategy to profit from Ambacs potential demise by shorting banks with large exposure to Ambac-insured securities. (The shorts were bets the banks shares or holdings would decrease in value as Ambac incurred additional harm.) In late 2007, Bear, Stearns & Co. Senior Managing Director Jeffrey Verschleiser boasted that (a)t the end of October, while presenting to the risk committee on our business I told them that a few financial guarantors were vulnerable to potential write downs in the CDO and MBS market and we should be short a multiple of 10 of the shorts I had put on . . .

shaw capital management:Identify Theft, Financial Scams Top Internet Crimes List

By Elizabeth Montalbano ,  InformationWeek
February 25, 2011 03:41 PM
Failure to pay or deliver merchandise, scams in which someone impersonates the FBI, and identity theft were the top three Internet crime complaints last year, according to the FBI/National White Collar Crime Center’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). Victims of these crimes reported losing hundreds of millions of dollars, the center said.
The IC3, which has logged Web-based crime complaints for 10 years, released its 2010 Internet Crime Report (PDF) this week. Last year, the center received 303,809 complaints — or an average of about 25,000 per month — mainly reported by men between the ages of 40 and 59 years old living in the U.S. states of California, Florida, Texas, or New York.
Computer crimes, and various forms of fraud — including advance-fee, spam, auction, credit card, overpayment, and miscellaneous types — rounded out the top 10 complaints lodged to the IC3 in 2010, according to the report.
The center has recorded more than 2 million complaints about attempts to defraud people via the Internet since its inception.
While men still predominantly report Internet crimes to the center, the previous ratio of men reporting crimes 2.5 to 1 over women has dramatically narrowed, according to IC3. Now women are reporting crimes nearly equally, according to the report.
Though middle-aged people file the biggest number of complaints, those in the 60-and-over age group account for the demographic with the biggest rise in complaints in the IC3′s 10-year history, according to the report.
The FBI does not investigate all of the claims it receives, but 121,710 of the ones reported in 2010 did meet the criteria — some of which is based on the financial nature of the crime. In those cases, the agency refers the crime to the appropriate law-enforcement agency at the federal, state, or local level.
The FBI has used technology to improve investigations based on IC3 complaints in recent years. The search process is now automated, so law-enforcement analysts investigating the crimes can more easily find patterns on which to build cases. Law enforcement agencies in different jurisdictions, but investigating the same or similar cases, also have better information-sharing tools, according to the FBI.
In addition to complaints from the U.S., the IC3 also fielded complaints from people overseas in 2010, mainly from residents in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and India.
When the center had information about the people committing the crimes, it found that nearly 75% were men living in California, the District of Columbia, Florida, New York, Texas, and Washington. When perpetrators lived outside of the country, they were mainly from the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and Canada, according to the report.
The report also includes information about alerts the IC3 put on in 2010 around specific Internet scams people reported.
One concerned online apartment- and house-rental scams, while another used denial-of-service attacks on cell phones and landlines as a ruse to access victims’ bank accounts. Yet another Internet scam involved people sending fake e-mails looking for donations to disaster-relief efforts after last year’s massive earthquake in Haiti.