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AOL: Be Obnoxious And Make $3000!
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…
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Bot Net Used To Promote Pump-And-Dump Stock Scam
I’ve talked here about pump-and-dump stock scams as well as “bot nets” in the past, and this story combines these two subjects nicely and shows how computer hacking has evolved from an activity that was once practiced mostly by teenagers to impress their peers into a huge criminal enterprise where serious money is being made by…
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Texas Crook Sought In Penny Stock Scam
I guess being a crook is just in some people’s blood or something. That appears to be the case for a Houston criminal by the name of Harris Dempsey ”Butch” Ballow. Out on bail and already in trouble for allegedly being involved in a stock market scam, Ballow is now accused of cooking up another…
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How Badly Do You Want The Apple iPhone?
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…
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Ohio "Loses It" Again
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…
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Missing Backup Tape Holds Ohio Social Security Numbers
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…
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Centerline Financial Group Accused of Loan Scams
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…
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Pat Haines And N.M.E. Are At It Again
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…
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Afraid To Use Your Credit Card Online: Don’t Be!
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.…
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Don’t Advertise It If You Don’t Use It
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.…
Got any book recommendations?