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Corporate Identity Theft on the Rise

Posted by michael on from the hello,-Mr.-Microsoft? dept.

prostoalex writes "As millions of Americans lose their identities to online and offline thieves, a new kind of crime has been cooked up by the criminals who are not bothering with doing pesky credit card charges. They steal entire companies, opening up merchant accounts for existing businesses and running up charges from aforementioned stolen credit card numbers. What's worse, is that the hole the criminals exploit seems to be built into the system. According to Bob Sullivan from MSNBC, "Many of the processing firms interviewed for this article claimed they caught on to the fraud after the transactions had cleared, but before the suspects had withdrawn the money from various checking accounts around the country. One did concede, however, that the scheme has real potential.""

9 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. ALEX KIDD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    i'm sorry but teh sega master system was the best of all time and alex kidd in mircale world is oslo the best i think anyone who doesnt like it has a choice to make to stop being ghey! in teh england hardware they actually stamped the rom into the ram instead of that lame snail game that we had

  2. hoaah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    First post.

  3. heh by hyperstation · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    slashdot's getting DDoS'ed....

  4. Re:surely you can come up with better stories by lukewarmfusion · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Surely you can find better ways to spend your time than trolling on the Internet.

  5. Re:surely you can come up with better stories by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Surely you can dare to post logged-in... ;)

  6. Re:As long as... Theft were OK by NoMoreNicksLeft · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I have karma to burn. Only one of them was +1...

    And if you want to know if I condone theft, then yes, against large corporations that have stolen my rights, government, and country from me... I don't mind seeing them get stolen from. It's about the closest thing to justice possible.

    It hasn't been a week, where Balmer all but admitted that they were going to leverage their monopoly power of computer operating systems to destroy Apple and its iPod. He appears convinced Microsoft will lead the way in Digital Rights Management and also believes Microsoft will steal a march on Apple in making the digital home a reality because Apple "doesn't have the volumes". "There is no way that you can get there with Apple. The critical mass has to come from the PC, or a next-generation video device," he said."

    But go on, tell me that we can fix this the right way, I don't believe you.

  7. Damn! by jmcmunn · · Score: -1, Offtopic


    Damn, and I just earned my 20GB iPod from freeipods.com and now I can't even brag about having the latest, greatest mp3 player. :-(

    Really though, to me an Mp3 player is an Mp3 player. If I wanted to have pictures on it, I would have bought one of the other media players available. And this statement is exactly why Apple is releasing this version I am sure. Once it plays video, I will think about upgrading, but even there I like the small, light, minimal interface I have now. All I want to do is listen to music. Some day my needs will change and I will spend the money I guess.

    1. Re:Damn! by jmcmunn · · Score: 0, Offtopic


      How the heck does a comment about iPods get rated offtopic in an iPod thread? Sometimes moderators have their heads up their asses.

      I can see if I made some off hand comment, but this was just an honest replay about my iPod...WTF people. 50% of the time a comment like this would get modded up as "Insigtful", which is equally as wrong. A simple "Funny" or nothing at all would suffice. Not every comment has to be categorized as something. This is why you all need to meta-moderate more often...keep moderators honest.

  8. Re:thanks slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Ive got a sneaky feeling that firefox is falling down on the adverts and IFRames.

    I went about 3 or 4 weeks without noticing any problems.

    then they started up again all of a sudden.

    Now, when people keep hitting refresh to fix the page, it causes 2 or 3 times the server load than usual (slash is SO dynamic and customisable, that almost every page refresh requires a db lookup.)

    However, to mitigate, clearing cookies and removing user from the equation means your user settings arent applied, and you get the quicker default user account bits.

    thats my 0.02 anyway....