Walter Mossberg, writing in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, outlines the first rule of avoiding online scams: never trust that any email from your bank is actually coming from your bank:

Don’t trust email from financial institutions. Email is so easily manipulated by crooks that you simply should never, ever consider any email from a financial institution as legitimate. The message may bear a bank’s or a broker’s logo, but you should never respond to such an email, and never click on any link it contains.

Walt also points to an interesting new service, Shazou, that offers a Mozilla Firefox plugin that makes it easy to see the location of the servers that power any website. Visting what you think is your bank’s website and it’s located in Russia?
Depositor beware!

Thanks to Paymentsnews for pointing out the article.

CNN reported today that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is the latest victim of credit card fraud. Apparently someone used his credit card to charge more that $2000 at Wal-Mart and other stores in Monroe, North Carolina. CNN quotes the Congressional leader as saying: “It’s not a tremendous inconvenience for me. I won’t have to pay it.”

Experian’s mother company GUS, today annouced further details about the anticpated spinout of Experian.  The $1.5 billion IPO is exected to take place on October 11 on the London Stock Exchange.  GUS shareholders still have to approve the plan, with a meeting scheduled for August 29, 2006.

The San Jose Mercury News published an editorial yeterday, subtitled “Voters shoud insist upon vigorous identity-theft law, ” which continues to say:

While extending the concept of the security freeze nationwide, HR 3997 would allow only individuals who have been victims of identity theft to freeze their records. That’s like allowing only homeowners whose houses have burned down to install fire alarms.

In short, HR 3997 rolls back existing state laws and provides no new protections against identity theft.

The House Committee on Financial Services website makes it almost impossible to find a copy of the bill as amended back in March of 2006 by the Committee. It was these amendments which caused much of the controversy related to credit freeze, by pre-empting state laws that allow all consumers the right freeze their credit reports to prevent identity theft. So here is a copy of the updated HR 3997 for reference: Link to HR 3997 (pdf)