Search
| Save With Our Consolidator Airfare (What are consolidator tickets?) |
 |
 |
||||||||||||||||
| Outbound: | From: | To: | Date: | Time: | ||||||||||||||
| Return: | From: | To:
|
Date: | Time: | ||||||||||||||
| Class: | Advanced Flight Search
Multiple cities, direct flights and more! |
|||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
Latest Forum Posts
| Re:Camera phones |
| Re:Camera phones |
| Re:Statue of Liberty R... |
 |
Sign Up For Our Newsletter - It's Free! Our bi-weekly newsletter is filled with travel news and great deals. |
Home 
Community News Feature Articles Dangerous Internet Access While Traveling
Community News Feature Articles Dangerous Internet Access While Traveling
| Dangerous Internet Access While Traveling |
| Monday, 21 May 2007 | |
 What danger lurks... The way it works, according to the U.S. Justice Department, is fiendishly clever. It’s an old twist on what’s called “pump-and-dump” where increased investment in a stock sharply raises its value, then investors unload their shares while the price is high. Here, the crooks install keystroke-logging programs on publicly used computers at hotel business centers and Internet cafes, then look for online investors’ account information and passwords. They then liquidate the investors’ account, transfer funds to their own account and use the funds to buy big on a stock they already own. This makes the price of the stock go up, and then they sell. According to an article on Bloomberg .com one man came home from a five-day fishing trip to find his previously healthy online account was now $200,000 in the red. They note that Internet security experts say that criminals target online brokerages because of the high turnover rate for stock purchases and the large amount of money that flows through a relatively small number of accounts. The FBI and Homeland Security have been meeting with Internet securities exchange companies like E*Trade , Fidelity , TD Ameritrade and Scottrade to try and head off increased fraud, working with a partnership between public agencies and private companies called the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance (NCFTA) to brainstorm ways to protect investors. Online trading firms are especially eager to find a solution to these schemes, because it costs them a lot of money. An estimated 30 million customers use Internet brokerages and, so far, the companies have reimbursed victims of online swindles. In January, a federal court indicted three men from India for running an online scam that swindled 60 customers at nine different brokerage firms out of over $2 million. So next time you’re traveling, think twice before typing sensitive information into a public computer. You may end up with a far more expensive vacation than you bargained for. |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
