Category: Consumer

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

Here’s something that I run into once in a while that is pretty irritating. I find this most common on web sites that are set up by businesses that are traditional “brick and mortar” businesses and not so much on sites that are built with the idea of doing a lot of business via the Internet.…

OK, so this post will be more of a rant than anything else, but I find myself so ticked off about this whole TJX data breach thing that I have to sound off a little bit somewhere. For those that have not heard, there is a company called TJX that is the parent company for…

I recently presided over a major clean-up effort here at my house. The end of the year seemed like a good time to get a fresh start by getting rid of all the useless junk that has been accumulating around here for the last few years. It would have been easier to believe “decades” if…