The Fraud Collaboration Project was launched in August of 2007 with goal a shared fraud pattern data base and identifying the infrastructure needed to use such a data base on a collaborative basis. Because of the complexity of the project, the team of participants broke into four work groups to complete many tasks that needed to be performed.

It was the year of computing dangerously, and next year could be worse.

That is the assessment of computer security experts, who said 2006 was marked by an unprecedented spike in junk e-mail and more sophisticated Internet attacks by cybercrooks.

December 24, 2006 — If you’re not careful what you throw in your trash, you might be throwing away your most valuable possession: your identity.

In the last two months, police report at least seven complaints from local residents whose trashcans or trash was stolen.

“This is what we commonly refer to as Dumpster diving,” police Sgt. William Dietrich said.

This sort of trash picking can be profitable.

“The suspect will obtain vital financial information by simply digging through trash,” Dietrich said. “It’s become a problem recently in the past three to four years.”

This year alone, there have been about 1,000 cases of identity theft reported to the Brownsville Police Department, Sgt. Jimmy Manrrique said.

In 2001, there were more than 100,000 cases of identity theft in the United States, and that has increased to more than 1 million cases per year, Dietrich said.

“Over a five-year period, more than 27 million consumers were victims of identity theft,” according to a Federal Trade Commission Survey conducted in 2003.

‘Tis the season for eggnog, mistletoe and…cyber crooks? It’s unfortunate, but as consumers become more comfortable with online shopping, cyber crooks are getting better about finding newer, sneakier ways to trick them into passing on personal information for their own gain.

An ordinary bank customer has persuaded one of the UK’s largest credit rating agencies to adopt a totally free technique that could dramatically cut ID theft.
From this week, UK agency Equifax has agreed to make it easier for consumers to amend their credit records with a simple thumbprint ID, with the requirement that anyone applying for credit under that customer’s name must supply a corresponding print on any application.