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When you are most vulnerable to fraud

Whenever you answer the phone or use your card, fraudsters could be trying to con you out of money. So when are you most at risk and what can you do about it?

The number of people being scammed out of money at cash points has tripled in the first four months of this year, according to figures from Financial Fraud Action (FFA).

The rise has been attributed to ‘shoulder-surfing’ and ‘skimming’ – for example a fraudster reading your PIN over your shoulder after fitting devices to the ATM to either trap your card or read its details.

In January 1,173 cases were reported to be the number has steadily increased to 2,276 at the end of April.

However it’s not just cash points being targeted. The crime has also been reported at Transport For London ticket machines. And in a similar vein, more people are falling prey to theft by distraction at supermarkets, FFA found.

The increase in so-called ‘crude fraud’ comes after security for online transactions and banking has become been beefed up.

Britons are being urged to protect their details when using a card – either to pay or take cash out of an ATM. If your card is swallowed by a machine for any reason, report it to your card company immediately – ideally using your mobile phone while you are still in front of the machine.

If a cashpoint looks as though it’s been tampered with, don’t use it.

But this is far from the only time you're vulnerable to fraudsters. So we've taken a look at the key times and places fraudsters target people, as well as what you can do to protect yourself.

When the phone rings

‘Courier fraud’ takes place when a victim gets a fake call under the guise of a bank or financial provider to say that the victim’s account has been compromised and they would like to collect the card.

The target is then tricked into handing over their PIN and card.

However, a bank will never ring to tell you that they are coming around to pick up your card, so never hand it over to anyone who comes to ‘collect it’. Financial services providers never ask for PINs – even through typing it into the phone

– so don’t give it out.

Mobile phone fraud has become more of a problem in recent years. Among the tricks, is the ‘missed call’ scam - when people call back a number that they don’t recognise and are directed to a premium rate number. Consumers are therefore urged not phone or text unsolicited numbers.

Also beware any unsolicited calls. Anything from someone trying to sell you shares through to telling you your child has played truant and there is a fine to pay. If it's a real call you will never be penalised for not paying immediately and in most cases fine notices are issued through the post.

When you check your email

Despite the increase in online security, there are still some fraudsters who have found ways to get around it, notably through phishing and cloning.

This is when fraudsters trick consumers into disclosing information by copying reputable websites or sending emails in the name of a trusted brand.

More recently fraudsters have fooled people into paying for passport advice or information through copycat emails and websites.

Consumers should always be suspicious of unsolicited emails that are supposedly from a reputable organisation, such as your bank or the tax office.

Never go to the site by clicking on a link in an email. Check the web address when you do get there too - the login page on your bank’s website address should start with “https”, for example.

Don't forget traditional mail/post

It's hardly new, but it's still something to be aware of. Fraudsters still send out unsolicited letters with "special offers" or telling you "you've been selected" for a special prize.

More worryingly, they also still intercept mail. You need to be especially careful if you live in shared accommodation or have just one front door to multiple addresses.

It only takes one or two bills or card statements for as fraudster to gather enough information about you to impersonate you and take out debt in your name. Make sure these aren't left around unopened and make a list of which bills you're expecting so you are aware if one doesn't arrive.

Hackers target more than eight million computers
lovemoney.com – Mon, Feb 11, 2013 15:05 GMT

A cyber-scam network, which has infected more than eight million computers around the world in the past two years, has been shut down.

Microsoft and Symantec combined forces and closed down the hackers' network last week

The hackers used an online virus, known as the “Bamital Botnet”, to gain access to personal details stored on PCs.

Cyber-crime network
The botnet was used by criminals to access people’s PCs and hijack online search results. It would then lead the user to an unknown website which could start downloading malware, steal their personal information or charge businesses for false online advertisement clicks.

It also led users to websites they never intended to vist. For example, one user was redirected from an official Norton Internet Security Page, which appeared in a list of search results, to a rogue antivirus website distributing malware.

Although exact numbers aren’t known, Microsoft says more than eight million computers have been targeted with this virus in the past two years and 300,000 were disconnected this week from the network.

On 31st January Microsoft filed a lawsuit which was supported by Symantec to the botnet’s operators to sever communication lines. This didn’t happen, so data centres across the US were raided and the infected servers were disrupted.

Those computers which had been infected were then disconnected from the virus network. Users were directed to get rid of the virus.

This is the sixth time in the last three years that Microsoft has stopped a cybercrime network and the second in cooperation with Symantec.

“It was done in such a sneaky way that most victims wouldn’t have even noticed a problem while the botnet was still operating,” explained Richard Domigues Boscovich, assistant general counsel for Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit.

“Because the data gathered from this takedown will become part of Microsoft’s ongoing research in support of protecting its customers from a range of evolving online security threats, we can actually use the criminals’ infrastructure against them and make it harder and more expensive for them to commit cybercrime,” he added.

How to disinfect your computer
Computers which are currently infected with the virus were contacted with a message from Microsoft.

It appeared when the user attempted to search for something on the internet and told the user their computer was very likely to be infected with malware which was redirecting the results of their search queries.

Two free programmes were then listed, Microsoft Safety Scanner and the Norton Power Eraser, which users were encouraged to run to disinfect their computers. More information on how to clear the virus from your computer can be found on the Microsoft Support website.

How to avoid cyber crime
The best way to avoid being hacked is to keep your computer’s security systems up to date and regularly scan for infections. It’s also vital to use different passwords for all the accounts you use online and to use a password which isn’t likely to be hacked.

If your personal details have been stolen criminals can use them to get access to your accounts or apply for credit in your name. Therefore check your bank statements regularly and your credit record as this is where you’ll be able to spot any irregularities.

If you do see something untoward, such as a payment you haven’t authorised, call your bank immediately and let it know.

How to protect your PINs and passwords
by Cliff D'Arcy on 25 September 2012

As new research reveals some of us are making it far too easy for criminals to guess our passwords and PINs, here are some ways to ensure you protect yourself properly.

New research has found that a staggering one in nine of us use '1234' as the PIN for our bank cards. While it might be easy to remember, it's also one of the first numbers a criminal would try if they got hold of your card.

Other popular, and therefore dangerous, combinations include the James Bond-influenced '0007' and '1984', which might show good taste in literature but could leave your bank account cleaned out.

So how do you set a safe password or PIN? Here are my top tips.

Pathetic passwords

The worst of all passwords – and one of the most common – is 'password'. This is as bad as no password at all. Don't use it, ever.

Other poor passwords include '123456', 'abc123' and 'qwerty' (the first six letters from the top left of the letter keyboard). Using your first and last names (such as 'cliffdarcy') is weak, too.

Also, 'computer' is a pretty silly password.

'Monday' is another bad password – when we discovered our IT master was using it at school, we promptly changed it to 'Tuesday'. 'Letmein' (let me in) and 'iloveyou' (I love you) are also pretty feeble.

Many passwords require a minimum of six letters and, for some reason, 'monkey' is a popular choice.

Other easily found passwords may be your favourite football team or a family member's name. Thanks to public databases and social networking, your supposedly private life may be laid bare for cyber-crooks to sift through.

Another terrible password is the name of the website you're visiting. For example, Barclays customers using 'Barclays' as a password are frankly asking for trouble.

One key opens many locks

Another problem arises if you use a single password to access many different websites. In this scenario, once I have one password, I have access to all your accounts. In effect, you're giving me a master key to open all your locks and make a 'clean sweep'.

Nevertheless, almost half of us use the same or similar passwords to access multiple sites. Naughty, naughty!

Passwords should be unique to each website you visit and every account you use. If you can't remember them, then write them down in a coded message and securely hide this piece of paper. Alternatively, use a Password Safe such as that developed by American cryptography expert Bruce Schneier.

How to create stronger passwords

Of course, strong passwords are more complicated than weak ones, but that's the whole point. They are harder to guess or find with a 'dictionary attack' (searching around 200,000 commonly used words in English).

To create strong passwords, you should:

1. Use at least eight characters and, ideally, more.
2. Use a mix of upper-case and lower-case letters, numbers and keyboard characters accessed via the shift key and non-letter keys.
3. Don't use your name, family names, slang words, swear words, words found in dictionaries and first names. These are easy meat for the professional cracker.

For more advice, read this report from online-security firm Imperva (PDF document) on the infamous hack of 32 million passwords from the RockYou.com website in December 2009.

Protecting your PIN

It's not just passwords where we need to be careful. To use a credit, debit or store card, you'll need the four-digit PIN (Personal Identification Number) linked to that plastic card. There are 10,000 combinations of PINs, from 0000 to 9999.

Of course, if you enter the wrong PIN three times, then your card will be locked. This prevents a 'brute force' attack to find PINs, which involves checking all possible combinations.

Even so, PINs aren't as secure as you'd imagine. This is because millions of cardholders change their default PINs to numbers which they find easier to remember. Often, this weakens the security of their cards.

Let me give three examples of weak PINs:

1. In the late Nineties, my boss challenged me to guess his PIN. Knowing him to be a proud Scot, I suggested 1314 – the year of the Battle of Bannockburn. Right, first time.
2. In one of his books, controversial Scottish author Irvine Welsh describes a banking scam to rip off supporters of Glasgow Rangers FC. His crooks steal lots of credit cards and try 1690 as the PIN – the year of the Battle of the Boyne. They successfully steal a fortune.
3. Your year of birth. Possibly the worst PIN to choose, full stop. When I was at university, I found scores of students naively using their year of birth (or birthday as Day-Day-Month-Month) as PINs. If you do this, change your PINs today.

To create a safer PIN, choose a random four-digit number, or simply stick with the default PIN given to you by your bank. Otherwise, you may inadvertently be putting your credit card and current account at risk of fraud.

Loose lips lose money

About five years ago, my father gave me an old laptop. When I went to use it, I found it to be password-protected.

Thinking hard about my dad's life, I tried two passwords before getting it right third time. It was the name of the British Army cavalry regiment he joined way back in the late Sixties.

In short, the more you know about someone, the easier it is to guess their passwords.

That's one of many reasons why I don't belong to social-networking sites such as Facebook, and why my Twitter posts link only to my articles. The more information you post on Facebook, Twitter and the like, the more personal data you give to crooks, criminals and fraudsters.

(Modern-day 'digital villains' also use Facebook and Google Street View to find out when people are on holiday, before burgling their empty homes.)

This is a lovemoney classic article that has been updated

How humans will survive in a million years
By Rob Walker, Yahoo News | Yahoo! News – Tue, Jul 16, 2013

An interview with the author of a new book about mass human extinction, space elevators and more

A Geminid meteor streaks across the sky over Steamboat Springs, Colo., on Dec. 12, …

If you’ve ever worried, or even wondered, about the ultimate fate of humanity itself, then here is the book for you: In Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, Analee Newitz takes on the enormous topic of “how humans will survive a mass extinction.”

As that phrase (the book’s subtitle) indicates, Newitz proves to be an optimist about the science and potential technologies of long-term survival — but she didn’t start out that way. And while she makes her case in conversational tones, her argument reflects sweeping research: Methodically but entertainingly walking the reader through evolutionary history starting with mass-extinction events from billions of years ago, she works her way into the laboratories of contemporary researchers devising hard-to-believe innovations to save humanity from every future calamity you can imagine. Along the way the reader meets techno-thinkers and scientists grappling with pandemics and other threats, devising wild-sounding bio-energy alternatives, "converting urban spaces into biological organisms," preparing for the possibility of a planet-threatening asteroid, storing the sum of human knowledge in a discreet set of computer files and figuring out various methods of traveling to other planets — including a “space elevator.”

By the end of the journey, you can see why Newitz is optimistic that tech innovations could help our species persist for another million years. But should you believe it? We had some questions. Happily, Newitz had answers.

You write that you "set out to write a book about how we are all doomed," but you ended up writing about ensuring humanity's next million years of not being doomed. Was that a gradual shift in your thinking, or were there particular turning-point moments in your reporting and research?

The first turning point came when I was learning about the survivors of the Great Dying, a mass extinction 250 million years ago which took out 95% of all species on the planet. It was the worst mass extinction in Earth's history, caused by disastrous climate changes in the wake of a super volcano. And yet a humble little creature called Lystrosaurus (whom I've written about here), who looked something like a cross between a pig and a lizard, managed to survive this horrific period. Pretty much every other animal on land went extinct. And Lystrosaurus survived just by sleeping in protected underground burrows, and walking into new environments where it adapted to the new world that was emerging in death's wake. I figured that if this little pig-lizard could do it, so could we. I think at that point I realized that humans are no worse and no better than other animals — we are so good at adapting to new circumstances that it's likely we'll follow in Lystrosaurus' path.

I think my second turning point was when I began questioning why so many books focus on extinction and apocalypse and never tackle the arguably more important topic of survival. If we don't explore ways to survive, then we'll never do it. So looking at survival is useful. But I think survival stories are also far more rich and interesting than extinction stories. Survival is complicated and heroic and surprising. Death is always the same.

As someone who often laments my fellow humans' apparent focus on the short term — a complaint that's often linked to the way we use technology — I was amazed at the long-term-focused science and technology infrastructure you explore in the book. Was there any area of long-term tech research that surprised you the most?

What surprised me over and over again was how a lot of these seemingly far-fetched technologies are already in our grasp. For example, if an asteroid were headed for Earth right now, we'd almost certainly see it coming several years out. We have space-based telescopes that are monitoring over 90 percent of the nearby rocks that could hit us, and astronomers are constantly looking for more. All it would take are a few space probes of the kind we already have to go out into space, meet one of those asteroids, and just push it out of an intercept course with Earth. No need for nukes or fancy-pants antigrav technology. We also have the technology to build carbon-neutral cities and even carbon-neutral factories. It was surprising to me to realize how much of our planet's future really is in the hands of humanity. We don't need to wait for a miracle, or for a new scientific discovery. We just need to implement the knowledge and tools we already have. We can do it!

You write that "science fiction … may be among the most important survival tools we have," essentially because science fiction writers can help us envision what researchers might not be able to imagine. Ray Bradbury's conviction that humans would be on the moon in his lifetime supposedly resulted in him being treated like a crank. Today writers like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling are viewed almost like seers in some quarters. Have we become more accepting of the view that science fiction can be highly relevant to everyday life?

Science has become part of everyday life, and therefore it's no surprise that science fiction is one of our most popular forms of storytelling. We crave stories about science because it helps us make sense of our civilizations. Science fiction can take something incredibly complex — like, say, genetics — and show us how it fits into our personal lives, or how it shapes society. Notice that I'm not talking about science fiction as a genre that predicts the future. There are many kinds of stories that try to tell us about the future, or alternate realities, and science fiction is merely one of them.

I don't think that SF's popularity today comes from people seeking answers about the future — they're searching for meaning in the present. That said, I think SF helps us think about what possible consequences might follow from a scientific or technological discovery. Equally as important, SF stories can help us think about society itself as a vast experiment, where each political regime or cultural power bloc is another attempt to solve our problems as a species.

A principle goal of Scatter, Adapt, Remember, you write at one point, is "to get us off this crowded planet and into space." This leads to some of the most insane-sounding stuff in the book — the "space elevator," for instance. You're talking about a million-year time frame, so it's perfectly understandable that you'd venture into territory that is essentially beyond our imaginations. But still: Did you encounter any schemes that were just too crazy to include?

The most implausible ideas I encountered were all about what humans would do in the long term instead of going into outer space. Humanity has a long history of exploring, starting a million years ago when our ancestors first left Africa.

By the time Homo sapiens evolved, our ancestors had already invented tools and fire. So we literally never knew a world without technological modifications (however crude). We are a species of tool-makers and explorers, and we're damn good at it. So I find it extremely unlikely that we would give up on exploring space. I think it's even more unlikely that we would choose to upload our brains to computers and live in virtual worlds instead of what we know as the physical world. I'm sure some people will do that, maybe temporarily while traveling through space. But just staying here on Earth when there are so many other awesome places to go? Like Saturn and Alpha Centauri and maybe even other dimensions? Whenever I encountered that idea, I found myself unable to accept it. But that probably reveals my own pro-space prejudices!

Now let's see if I can get you back into a pessimistic mood: Let's say you are right that we humans can persist for another million years. Why do we deserve to persist? What's so great about humans, anyway?

Whether or not we deserve to persist isn't really relevant to whether we will do it. "Deserving" is an ethical concern, not a survival issue. Even if humans are bastards, we are going to survive. We have all the traits of a survival species, just like Lystrosaurus. Saying that we deserve to go extinct doesn't solve our problems — it leads to both moral and practical paralysis. Humans are life forms, and life forms always fight to survive, no matter what. It's in our most fundamental, biological natures. So we'd better accept that, and work on making the future as comfortable as possible.

As human animals, we have evolved the ability to plan a better future for ourselves. We can even stop a mass extinction. It's not too late. We don't have to be angels to preserve our ecosystems. We just have to be practical, and not waste our time wondering whether we are good enough to deserve it. Let's not debate the magnitude of our sins. Let's get to work saving the world!

Annalee Newitz is on Twitter at @annaleen; her book is Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction.