Reunion.com is using a deceptive marketing strategy where they pretend to be someone you know who is inviting you to Reunion. If you go to Reunion.com to see who it is, sign up, and make the horrible gross mistake of giving them your e-mail address password, they will automatically send out false e-mails to all the people in your contact list.

Two things are going horribly wrong here. One is that Reunion.com is using false and deceptive practices and is doing nothing less than what a virus or hacker would do. I hope the hammer of law hits them hard and fast

The second thing is that people somehow believe it's ok to give up their e-mail address password which is a huge no no.

(H/T to The Consumerist for the link)

Another breach. Who'd have guessed*?

(*sarcasm)

The company is aware of about 1,800 cases of fraud reported so far relating to the breach.

Surprising that they'd admit that. Now I'm just waiting for them to recommend credit freezes to all their customers. Still waiting… Hmm…

A British company has developed a camera that can see through clothes, but unlike Backscatter, it doesn't provide pornographic photos of the target.

Depending on the material, the signature of the wave is different, so that explosives can be distinguished from a block of clay and cocaine is different from a bag of flour.

It shoots some rays at the target and reads the response. It's more like a sonar device than a camera and it if works, this will be not only more effective at detecting threats, but also much better for personal privacy.

(H/T to Schneier's Blog for the link)

The agencies that are supposed to protect us turned against us. It's depressing that more hasn't been done about this and sooner.

Of course, you know why Bush isn't defending them the same way as some other agencies? Because he didn't authorize it and therefore doesn't need to shield them to cover his own butt. That's my guess anyway.

Just another example for why we need federal monitoring and regulation of certain industries and services. Stuff like this would go on all the time if there wasn't oversight and corresponding accountability. Just look at the presidential adminsitration for an example.

Now to see if anything comes of this.

(Circulating everywhere online, but I got it at The Consumerist)

According to their annual report to congress, the Federal Trade Commission recieved over 69,000 complaints that debt collectors were violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (the law that prevents them from harassing you or using dirty tactics to try and get you to pay a debt). In response, the FTC filed against 3 debt collectors.

Thanks FTC!

Schneier has a great summary article of how citizen informants combined with officials who won't take responsibility for over-reacting over the last few years is making America look dumber and dumber every day.

Here's an excerpt:

Causing a city-wide panic over blinking signs, a guy with a pellet gun, or stray backpacks, is not evidence of doing a good job: it's evidence of squandering police resources. Even worse, it causes its own form of terror, and encourages people to be even more alarmist in the future. We need to spend our resources on things that actually make us safer, not on chasing down and trumpeting every paranoid threat anyone can come up with.

Adding another nail to the coffin for citizen trust in Verizon (assuming there was any to begin with), it turns out that they did in fact participate in the illegal spying program.

Let the lawsuits begin…

Not surprisingly, a class-action lawsuit has begun against Apple and AT&T becuase of their firmware update that some claim was intentionally designed to break any iPhone that someone had unlocked.

The real problem here is that people really like the iPhone. As soon as it came out, busy hackers got to work unlocking it so it could be used with another cell provider's service and have 3rd party programs installed on it. Apple and AT&T didn't like that and soon issued a new update to the phone which caused many of the ones that had been "hacked" to break. There are some who think it was done intentionally.

While I can certainly imagine it, you would think that they would have anticipated the legal and customer backlash. You would think… but companies have made these kinds of mistakes before.

If you've been on college campuses these days, you'll often see the booths where you get a free shirt or coffee mug for signing up for a credit card. Well, it's pretty obvious that college kids have no idea how to handle credit and the credit card companies know it.

Rhoades took the job and signed up roughly 30 students for cards. He regrets any trouble he caused other students from his actions.

Still, his actions may have been most damaging to himself. He ended up with $13,000 worth of debt that he is now struggling to repay.

We don't get any training how to deal with and manage credit, but we get plenty of training on how to get and abuse it. So sad…

(H/T to The Consumerist for the link)

Sprint used any minor changes to service plans to extend customer contracts by up to two years.

“When you receive complaints across the board, from firefighters to lawyers, from retirees to construction workers, all of whom feel they were unfairly manipulated by their cell phone company, you have a problem,” Attorney General Lori Swanson said. She was joined at a State Capitol news conference by a number of Minnesota consumers who described their problems with the company.

In other words, these aren't people who are not paying attention to the legal agreements and they're most likely not lying to get out of their agreements. In fact, the article says that Sprint has had over 30 thousand complaints against them in the last 3 years registered with the Better Business Bureau.

I knew ATT/Cingular was bad, but I didn't know about Sprint. That doesn't leave many carriers to choose from.

It turns out that Comcast thinks they have the right to control how someone uses the Internet. Bittorrents, often, but not always used to distribute copyrighted content is one of the types of filesharing that big nasty companies like the RIAA target. Whether in the spirit of cooperation with the RIAA or just to save a little money by preventing heavy Internet users from actually using the Internet, Comcast is throttling Bittorrent shares and actually blocking seeders (people who provide the content originally).

If this disgusts you, now is a good time to become a supporter of net neutrality.

From the Washington Post, a fairly concise description of what the CSPC is, where it came from, why it's necessary, and why it's almost completely irrelivant today.

(H/T to Consumerist.com for the link)

AT&T, world known for their honesty and loyalty to customers (this is sarcasm folks), was required to offer a $10 per month DSL service (as a condition of their Bellsouth merger) which they now say that nobody seems interested in. It's hard to be popular if no one knows about it though.

That being said, spread the word! Make sure everyone has a chance to cut their fees by switching to this plan. This doesn't do near enough to put AT&T to justice, but if you're already a customer and don't need the high bandwidth, make sure they don't get away with hiding their mandated $10 plan.

Refusing to cancel someone's account is a very bad thing (and probably illegal). However, cancelling your account can be a fight that you're not prepared to handle.

In case you didn't know this already, companies are structured to put enormous pressure their representatives to keep you from cancelling at all costs.

If you are a typical call center worker - unskilled, uneducated, living paycheck to paycheck off a generally low-pay and no-benefit job, being constantly driven by management to retain customers - what do you do when your numbers are low for the month: cancel Suzy Q.'s account and risk being fired, or sweep it under the table and be able to pay for your kids' school clothes? After all, if you call back tomorrow to see if the account's really cancelled, chances are this customer will reach a different CSR. Chances are, this call isn't one of the three or four calls a month that is actually monitored by someone. Chances are indeed very good that there will be absolutely no consequence to not canceling this customer's account, but there will definitely be a consequence if the account is actually cancelled.
You canceling your ISP's internet service or your magazine subscription is a very small matter to you. But it is a critical matter of employment to the CSR. Under such pressures, created by greedy companies, who can be surprised that "mistakes" are made.

The real villains here are the companies who aren't gusty enough to tell their call center people to do things illegally and immorally, but structure their centers in such a way to make it as likely as possible.

Verichip is the first major company to try to make a market out of implanting people with a hard to remove tracking device. They tout it as a "security" device in that it can be used for proximity detection in sensitive areas and can be used to link to medical information in an emergency where the patient can't speak for themselves (for a yearly fee of course).

Considering that the chips actaully weaken security, are hard to remove, and basically destroy all privacy you might have had, I find it hard to understand why people would consider this.

Anyway, there's a good summary of the Verichip company here.

Pfizer lost data, blah, blah, blah. All these reports do is strengthen the arguments for credit freezes and against data rape.

If we could freeze our credit reports, this wouldn't be a problem and if they didn't rape us for our data, this wouldn't have happened (oversimplified, yes, but it's the basic idea).

I just want to remind everyone about this so here's a list of printers that print yellow "Tracking dots" on everything you print. The dots can be used to trace a print directly back to your printer in case of a crime or if something you printed is anywhere near a crime thus possibly involving you.

Consumeraffairs has been watching the banking industry with increasing shame. Banks realize how easy it is to "encourage" customers to make banking mistakes that end up in costly fees:

Common banking practices, such as clearing high-dollar debits before subtracting smaller debit amounts, holding deposits longer than necessary, and failing to decline overdrafts or warn customers at the checkout or ATM if they have insufficient funds, increase the number of overdrafts suffered by consumers

Note that these are concious, purposeful acts designed to bring more debt to the consumer. Let me explain one of the scenarios above:

You make the following purchases during the day:

Your account balance: $70 (It's almost payday, you're running low)

Little do you realize, your wife has decided to go ahead an fill up the SUV for the weekend trip.

Now, assuming that the bank takes care of all transactions at the end of the day, what's the most advantagous way for them to do this? Easy! Apply all debits in order of size. Watch what happens:

And to add insult to injury, maybe you got paid that day and deposited the money, but the bank held the deposit until the next day for no reason that you can think of (also part of their bag of tricks).

So in this case, the bank's artificial policy of applying drafts in size order has hurt you plenty. If you complain (if) then there's a chance they'll reverse one charge as a matter of customer service. That still leaves you with a $60 debt to the bank. Compare it with this scenario where it was done in the order the drafts occured:

In this case you have one overdraft fee due to a simple mistake. Chances are the bank will credit it and you and your wife can make sure you don't make the same mistake twice when the balance is low. Life is happy and birds sing…

Anyway, you see how banks, who know a whole lot more about money management than you, can make very little and innocent csounding policy changes that will screw you royally. Let's hope that the bill that Consumeraffairs mentions in the article passes to end this kind of crap.

Lastly, a freebie for you. If you are the kind of person who frequently finds themselves paying overdraft fees, try this trick I learned in my more "cash desperate" days:

From the "Wow that's funny, though very, very sad" department, we hear a story of a T-Mobile rep who tries desperately to keep a customer from cancelling his account because of buying the new iPhone.

The best part is probably when Vic asks Matt if he still wants to stay with Tmobile and Matt says, "No," and then Vic asks, "Was that a yes?"

They try to sell him to taking to the Tmobile Wing, give him a month of free service, or reduce his service fee to $20 a month and keep his phone "as a backup."

Though very funny because this happened to someone with the tenacity to see it through, it's sad because this is the kind of back-handed harrassement that customers often have to go through to cancel services. Just look at the famous AOL cancellation video from not that long ago.

Of course, the other sad part is that the iPhone is AT&T service which we all know to avoid.