How a trivial cell phone hack is ruining lives

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On a Tuesday night in May, Sean Coonce was reading the news in bed when his phone dropped service. He chalked it up to tech being tech and went to sleep. When he woke up, his Gmail account had been stolen and by Wednesday evening he was out $100,000.

“This is still very raw (I haven’t even told my family yet),” Coonce wrote in an anguished Medium post. “I can’t stop thinking about the small, easy things I could have done to protect myself along the way.”

On a Monday night in June, Matthew Miller’s daughter woke him up to say that his Twitter account had been hacked. He had no cell phone service; within a few days Miller lost his Gmail and Twitter account and $25,000 from his family bank account.

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The promise of managing identity on the blockchain

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Blockchain, the secure distributed ledger technology first created to track bitcoin ownership, has taken on a number of new roles in recent years tracking anything of value from diamonds to real estate deeds to contracts. The blockchain offers the promise of a trusted record that can reduce fraud. Some industry experts say that over the coming years, it could be used to control identity information in a more secure fashion.

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Stealing identities of elderly parents a hidden but common crime

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Stealing identities from elderly parents may be more prevalent that previously thought.

Theft of a childs’ identity is the  scourge of the digital age. It is a terrible crime that often sees parents ruining their own kids’ futures by taking out mortgages, car loans and other financial obligations in their names. But a new study shows that another kind of family-based ID theft, which rarely grabs headlines, might be much more prevalent: Stealing the identities of elderly parents.

 

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Beware red light camera scam steals your identity

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This new scam will have you seeing red.

Some people may manage to escape the fines from traffic light cameras but most of us simply pay up without thinking about it or questioning whether the charge is valid.  Tricky scammers are taking advantage of that lazy human tendency, making a handful of money and stealing identities in the process.

 

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Two men reenact Weekend at Bernie’s with buddy’s corpse

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In the 1989 movie, Weekend at Bernie’s, In the 1989 film, Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman play two men who find their boss dead and decide to hang out with his body.

What would you do after discovering that your friend is dead, would you (A) call 911; (B) contact a family member; or (C) head off on a Weekend at Bernie’s-style tour of bars and strip clubs, with the fun and frivolity all charged to the deceased?

 

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