Fergie's Tech Blog

First Person: Fraud Hits Home -- My Front Porch!

Charles Ornstein writes in The Los Angeles Times:

When it comes to protecting myself against identify theft, I like to think that I'm pretty savvy.

I pay most of my bills online, and every day or two I check the transactions in my bank and credit card accounts. Once a year, I request personal reports from all three credit bureaus. And I always shred credit card solicitations, ATM withdrawal slips and receipts bearing my signature.

So when I received an answering machine message early last month from a woman named Josephine who claimed to work for Bank of America Corp., I thought I knew just what was going on.

This was one of those "phishing" scams, I thought, in which a thief pretends to be a bank representative and gathers personal information from unsuspecting victims.

I wasn't going to take the bait.

But as it turned out, I already had been had.

posted by Fergie @ 5/07/2007 12:15:00 PM