Happy National Consumer Protection Week (NCPW)! We’re going to dedicate this year’s National Consumer Protection Week to spreading awareness about the importance of securing your identity from the threats you face every day.
Your identity is at the core of who you are. But criminals see your identity as money in their pockets. Let’s kick off NCPW 2018 by diving into some of the identity risks out there today, and ways you can combat them in your daily lives.
Gift card fraud affects digital and physical gift cards alike. While fraudsters may approach gift card fraud with a variety of scams, the goal is to ultimately steal the funds from the cards while remaining undetected.
Most likely you’ve probably bought and/or received at least one gift card this year. Whether it was for a birthday, holiday, special event or “just because,” gift cards are the most wanted – and most popular gift in the U.S. for nearly any occasion.
With a 200 percent increase in digital gift cards last year, it can be easy to forget these cards hold real monetary value that fraudsters want to take for themselves. Gift card fraud is on the rise, as Flashpoint cited a notable increase in discussions surrounding gift cards on the Dark Web in 2017. Let’s look at some ways that fraudsters use scams to commit gift card fraud. Continue reading
A recent data breach affecting 123 million American households speaks to the expected increase in social engineering scams of those impacted by the breach.
California-based data service company Alteryx recently experienced a data breach that exposed some PII elements (address, phone number, longitude/latitude coordinates). However, the data exposed is even more troubling because it was paired with extensive analytics on consumer behaviors, interests and financial/spending habits. The 36 GB file focused mostly on consumer behavioral segments – 248 to be exact – like “Book Buyer,” “Religious Contributor,” “Phone Activity Date” and “Interest in Gourmet Cooking.” Continue reading
Data breaches have become all-too-common amongst retailers, businesses, educational institutions and health care facilities. Last year, 1,093 data breaches led to over 36 million compromised records in the United States, leaving millions of Americans’ personal information exposed.
The best way you can protect your information from compromise is by taking proactive measures to safeguard it, especially after a data breach. Follow us as we break down what can happen to your information after a data breach, what the law says about notifying you of breached data and how to secure information that has already been compromised. Continue reading