With a tough economy making timely retirement less likely for many folks, retirement-related financial scams may be on the upswing. Here are five ways to know if you are being played.
Identity Theft
Wells Fargo Mails Statements to Wrong Customers
Some Wells Fargo customers who opened their accounts in Florida or South Carolina are getting an unpleasant surprise when they open the monthly statement they receive in the mail: At least some of the statement pages inside don’t …
Discover Brings Back Single-Use Account Numbers
After discontinuing a security feature that let cardholders generate a one-time use number for transactions last month, Discover Financial Services did an about-face and reinstated its Secure Online Account Numbers program.
Study: Your Card Info Is At Risk
Buried in back offices and data centers across the country, far from consumers’ eyes, is a network of transmission lines and storage facilities responsible for getting your card information from point A to point B every time you make a purchase. A few years ago, companies in the industry got together and implemented security rules for …
Oh, the Irony: Identity Theft Prosecutor Is Hacked
Credit card skimming, in which a crook installs a device in an ATM or payment terminal to steal account information, can happen to anybody. For proof, look to Seattle, where Jenny Durkan, the U.S. Attorney for the Western …
Discover Discontinues Random-Number Security Feature
Discover Financial Services is discontinuing a security tool that allowed cardholders to request a randomly generated, one-time-use card number they could utilize for online or card-not-present transactions for which they …
New Tool Uses Webcams to ‘Read’ Credit Cards
There’s been a lot of buzz lately about mobile payments technologies like Square, a little white box that plugs into an iPhone and essentially turns it into a credit card processing tool. Small business owners and entrepreneurs …
Could Your Credit Card Information be Hacked?
If you think the British tabloid phone-hacking scandal has nothing to do with your personal financial information, think again. A consumer advocate savvy in high-tech financial security discovered that similar tricks used by hackers to break into people’s voicemail accounts could also be exploited to gain access to confidential credit …
Visa Puts Its Weight Behind New Smartphone Payment Systems
This week, Visa began campaigning to get retailers in the U.S. to upgrade their payment terminals — what we used to call cash registers — to devices capable of reading EMV chips, the technology behind “chip-and-pin” cards now …
Paying by Phone Is Riskier Than You Think
Technological advances and the proliferation of smartphones have given consumers an increasing number of ways to pay for goods and services using their mobile phone. Many of these options are similar to online bill paying, in …
How Banks Are Aiding and Abetting Identity Theft
Why in the world are banks still using SSNs as a major form of customer identification?
Your Credit Card Data Is Probably at Risk
Hackers are getting smarter when it comes to stealing your personal account information. The recent data breach at Citi — which turned out to affect some 80 percent more customers than initially reported and led to $2.7 million …
