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US Financial Quagmire Bringing Out the Scammers
coondoggie contributes this snippet from NetworkWorld: "You could probably see this one coming. With all of the confusion and money involved you knew there would be cyber-vultures out there looking to cash in. Well the Federal Trade Commission today issued a warning that indeed such increased phishing activities are taking place. Specifically the FTC said it was urging user caution regarding e-mails that look as if they come from a financial institution that recently acquired a consumer's bank, savings and loan, or mortgage. In many case such emails are only looking to obtain personal information — account numbers, passwords, Social Security numbers — to run up bills or commit other crimes in a consumer's name, the FTC stated."
1. Delete e-mail.
2. Log in to bank via their web site.
What scares me is that while this guards against the garden variety phishing attack, it can't protect me from an ISP DNS compromise. Running *NIX on your home PC or using a Mac can't protect you from that either, so don't get smug. It's a good idea to find an "obscure" yet stable feature on your bank's site. Phishing sites may not take the time to duplicate it. If you know the bank is based in New York, and you traceroute it to Bulgaria, that's a bad sign too. I have to admit I'm not that paranoid though.
At the very least, 1 and 2 should be SOP for everybody. Financial institutions shouldn't put any kind of hypertext in a mail, and really ought not to even be using HTML mail which was evil right from its inception. I can dream, can't I?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
That's a list, not a run-on.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act
This is not capitalism - by influencing the market (especially so heavily) and giving money to institutions just because they're 'a huge part of the economy' we gave up capitalism.
Oh for the love of god, shut up or learn what the fuck you're talking about. The government been controlling the economy for the past century and been doing it heavily since at least the great depression. The federal reserve and various laws have never allowed capitalism to exist in a pure form for a damn good reason.
Don't bitch and complain when the government continues to do what it has done for a century. It should have kept this mess from happening in the first place but it didn't and now it's trying to prevent it from spreading. It's probably a lot better than the alternatives given how many recessions happened in the 19th century (not to mention the direct reasons for the federal reserve to have it's present amount of power).
These people fucked up - by the tenets of capitalism, if they can't survive this on their own, LET THEM FAIL. Oh, boo hoo, a tough few years. Better than going even further into debt just to bail out a few rich pricks who made the mistake of doing things where the benefits were far outweighed by the costs and potential risks.
The rich? Who do you think will really be in trouble when the economy implodes and unemployments goes through the roof? The rich who have stable savings in 50 different forms or the poor who live paycheck to paycheck? Maybe the middle class who just lost any ability to borrow money and had their retirement disappears?
This is to bail out the economy and not a bunch of rich people.
I will listen to that. CONVINCE me that your viewpoint is the correct viewpoint. I won't listen to "he's a weirdo" non-arguments.
I don't have to convince you of anything.
But let me ask a simple question; if it was the mean ol' government forcing these noble banks to make loans to people who wouldn't pay them back...
Why were so many of these bad loans made by banks that weren't being told to make them by the government? Why were so many of these loans made that had zero connection to either Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae? Why won't any of you the-free-market-always-works types answer these questions?