jmalmberg

February 9, 2012 - Late yesterday, California and New York agreed to join a $25 Billion settlement with the nation's five largest banks over their foreclosure and lending procedures. The settlement is the largest of its kind and will provided relief for as many as 1 million current homeowners who are having trouble with refinancing their homes because they owe more on them than they are actually worth. It will also provide some payment to those who lost their homes due to illegal foreclosure... Read Full Story

February 8, 2012 - A lot of internet phishing scams are obvious. They include misspelled words, grammatical errors and promises of millions of dollars in payments in you will only agree to wire two or three thousand dollars to an account in Nigeria. Most of these scams are conducted by e-mail, and a lot of the email messages advertising them contain viruses and Trojan horses that are easily picked up by antivirus software. But there is a new breed of scam artists that are now operating and... Read Full Story

February 6, 2012 - New York's State Comptroller, Tom DiNapoli is warning consumers not to become victims of a new scam. Targeted victims receive a regular postal mail letter stating that they have won a lottery or sweepstakes. Included with letter is a check that appears to be issued by the State of New York. And that check has apparently been a good enough forgery to fool some banks. Each check has DiNapoli's forged signature on it. Read Full Story

February 2, 2012 - Yesterday, the President unveiled a new plan that he would like to implement to help prevent more foreclosures. The plan addresses one of the largest issues currently faced by borrowers who are still current on their mortgage payments but under water on the amounts they owe. People in this position have been unable to refinance their mortgages to take advantage of lower interest rates. But the President would like to pay for the plan by imposing a fee on banks. And that fee... Read Full Story

January 31, 2012 - If you have never heard of the Death Master File (DMF), which is released by the Social Security Administration, then you don't know what ID thieves do. Current law requires that the DMF be released to just about anyone who wants it. But there have been big problems as a result of that law and Congress may be ready to change it. Read Full Story

January 27, 2012 - According to a report this morning on Fox News' Happening Now, criminal activity on Craigslist is on the rise. Most of the crimes involve scams and theft but there have also been at least twelve murders over the past year that are related to advertisements placed on the website. Just searching news articles on Google using the term Craigslist will give you an idea of the wide variety of crimes it is associated with. But there are things that you can do to protect yourself. Read Full Story

January 24, 2012 - Banks have made a wide variety of marketing mistakes over the past year. Just remember Bank of America's flirtation with debit card fees. The uproar caused the bank to lose customers and generated so much bad publicity that it had to reverse course within days. But that is so last year! Now that it's 2012, there is a green filed available for new bank marketing screw ups. And Citibank may just have made one that sets the bar for the duration of the year! Read Full Story

January 23, 2012 - In a case involving personal privacy and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, the Supreme Court has ruled that government agencies need to get a search warrant before they can install GPS devices on cars for tracking purposes. The ruling is a blow to the Justice Department, which had argued that no warrant was needed. But the case is far from a death-blow for government tracking of private citizens. Read Full Story

by Shawn Mosch (http://www.blogger.com/profile/00668897360179366316) of Scam Victims United (http://www.scamvictimsunited.com/) January 20, 2012 - Most of us use our computers on a daily basis, and the idea of a virus in our computer is something that no one wants to deal with.  So what if a computer technical support service called you and warned you that they had detected a virus on your computer, and they were able to help you to rid your computer of that virus BEFORE it corrupted all of... Read Full Story

January 19, 2012 - Claiming that a debt collector continued to harass him after being asked to stop, Marcus Mims filed a federal law suit under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). That suit was thrown out by the 11th Circuit Court of appeals on the grounds that Congress had not given consumers specific permission in the law to use the federal courts to settle claims. Now, the US Supreme Court has overturned that ruling. Read Full Story