NOT ALL THIEVES ARE STUPID...

NOW HEAR THIS...NOT ALL THIEVES ARE STUPID!!!


1. Some people left their car in the long-term
parking at San Jose while away, and someone broke into the car Using
the information on the car's registration in the glove compartment, they
drove the car to the people's home in Pebble Beach and robbed it. So I
guess if we are going to leave the car in long-term parking, we should
NOT leave the registration/insurance cards in it, nor your remote garage
door opener.


This gives us something to think about with all
our new electronic technology.


2. GPS.

Someone had their car broken into while they
were at a football game. Their car was parked on the green which was
adjacent to the football stadium and specially allotted to football
fans. Things stolen from the car included a garage door remote control,
some money and a GPS which had been prominently mounted on the
dashboard. When the victims got home, they found that their house had
been ransacked and just about everything worth anything had been stolen.
The thieves had used the GPS to guide them to the house.



They then used the garage remote control to open
the garage door and gain entry to the house. The thieves knew the
owners were at the football game, they knew what time the game was
scheduled to finish and so they knew how much time they had to clean out
the house. It would appear that they had brought a truck to empty the
house of its contents.



Something to consider if you have a GPS - don't
put your home address in it... Put a nearby address (like a store or gas
station) so you can still find your way home if you need to, but no one
else would know where you live if your GPS were stolen.



3. CELL PHONES

I never thought of this.......

This lady has now changed her habit of how she
lists her names on her cell phone after her handbag was stolen. Her
handbag, which contained her cell phone, credit card, wallet, etc., was
stolen. 20 minutes later when she called her hubby, from a pay phone
telling him what had happened, hubby says 'I received your text asking
about our Pin number and I've replied a little while ago.' When they
rushed down to the bank, the bank staff told them all the money was
already withdrawn. The thief had actually used the stolen cell phone to
text 'hubby' in the contact list and got hold of the pin number. Within
20 minutes he had withdrawn all the money from their bank account.



Moral of the lesson:

a. Do not disclose the relationship between
you and the people in your contact list. Avoid using names like Home,
Honey, Hubby, Sweetheart, Dad, Mom, etc...



b. And very importantly, when sensitive
info is being asked through texts, CONFIRM by calling back.



c. Also, when you're being texted by
friends or family to meet them somewhere, be sure to call back to
confirm that the message came from them. If you don't reach them, be
very careful about going places to meet 'family and friends' who text
you.





4. Purse in the grocery cart scam...



A lady went grocery-shopping at a local mall and
left her purse sitting in the children's seat of the cart while she
reached something off a shelf...wait till you read the WHOLE story! Her
wallet was stolen, and she reported it to the store personnel.



After returning home, she received a phone call
from the Mall Security to say that they had her wallet and that although
there was no money in it, it did still hold her personal papers. She
immediately went to pick up her wallet, only to be told by Mall Security
that they had not called her. By the time she returned home again, her
house had been broken into and burglarized. The thieves knew that by
calling and saying they were Mall Security, they could lure her out of
her house long enough for them to burglarize it.







*PLEASE PASS THIS ON

Even if this does not pertain to you....Pass it
on to your family and friends.

How they scam you...

Messages asking for personal information

Watch a video on detecting phishing.

Some spammers send fraudulent mass-messages designed to collect personal information, called 'spoofing' or 'password phishing.'
Here are a few ways you might recognize these messages:

• They ask you to provide your username and password or other personal information (e.g. Social Security number, bank account number, PIN number, credit card number, mother's maiden name, or birthday). Even if they appear to be from a legitimate source, or contain an official-looking webpage, be careful. Spammers often ask for this information in an attempt to steal your Gmail address, your money, your credit, or your identity.
• You might see a warning from Gmail when you open one of these messages. These phishing alerts operate automatically, much like spam filtering. Gmail's spam filters automatically divert messages that are suspected of being unwanted messages into 'Spam'. Similarly, Gmail's phishing alerts automatically display warnings with messages we suspect are phishing attacks so you know to exercise caution before providing any personal information.

You should always be wary of any message that asks for your personal information, or messages that refer you to a webpage asking for personal information. One thing to be sure of: Google or Gmail will never ask you to provide this information in an email; if the message asking for it claims to be from us, don't believe it.
Here's what you can do to protect yourself and stop fraudsters:

• Check the email address of the sender of the message by hovering your mouse cursor over the sender name and verifying that it matches the sender name.
• Check whether the email was authenticated by the sending domain. Click on the 'show details' link in the right hand corner of the email, and make sure the domain1 you see next to the 'mailed-by' or 'signed-by' lines matches the sender's email address. For more information on email authentication, please visit our Email Authentication article.
  
• Make sure the URL domain on the given page is correct, and click on any images and links to verify that you are directed to proper pages within the site. For example, the Gmail URL is http://mail.google.com/ or, for even more security, https://mail.google.com/. Although some links may appear to contain 'gmail.com,' you may be redirected to another site after entering such addresses into your browser.
• Always look for the closed lock icon in the status bar at the bottom of your browser2 window whenever you enter any private information, including your password.
• Check the message headers. The 'From:' field is easily manipulated to show a false sender name. Learn how to view headers.
• If you're still uncertain, contact the organization from which the message appears to be sent. Don't use the reply address in the message, since it can be forged. Instead, visit the official website of the company in question, and find a different contact address.
• If you enter your Google account or personal information as the result of a spoof or phishing message, take action quickly. Send a copy of the message header and the entire text of the message to the Federal Trade Commission at spam@uce.gov. If you entered credit card or bank account numbers, contact your financial institution. If you think you may be the victim of identity theft, contact your local police.
• Gmail doesn't send unsolicited mass messages asking for passwords or personal information. If you think your Gmail address has been compromised or taken over, please click here so we can help resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

* If our system flags a message as phishing, but you've validated the source from which the message originated, click the down arrow next to Reply at the top-right of the message pane, and select Report Not Phishing to let us know the message is legitimate. And if you receive a message that our phishing detection system doesn't pick up on, click Report Phishing to send a copy of the message to the Gmail Team.

1. domain: A domain is a name for an IP address and is more commonly recognized as a website or web address. For example, Google.com is a domain.
2. browser: A browser is an application you can use to access the Internet and visit websites. Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari are all examples of browsers.

All banks in trouble...

Chase Bank balance sheet is missing 3.5 billion. CEO's stuffed it in their pockets... Bank of America --stock mostly owned by the Chinese is in bad shape. Wells Fargo not much better. they bought out Wykovia's assets. 


Here is Kenai you can't cash an $10,000 check. They don't carry that much cash on hand. None of the banks do! There is a shortage of money in this country and the banks are barely scraping by. If there was a run on the banks they would all have to close their doors in an hour. A friend of mine wanted to buy a piece of construction equipment. The owner wanted $80,000 cash. He had to go to five banks to gather up enough cash.


Bank robbers wouldn't get much in this neighborhood. You walk in there with your rubber pistol and you would be lucky to walk out with $8,000.



Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington last February, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.


"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."
I put down my notebook. "Just that?"
"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."
Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.
This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18.


The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industry-wide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.
Invasion of the Home Snatchers
Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. "If the allegations in these settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims."

Taibblog: Commentary on politics and the economy by Matt Taibbi
To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest people on earth — people who simply get their companies to pay their fines for them. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration. "You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."
But that hasn't happened. Because the entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is fucked up.