Crime: You are asking to be robbed!

I bet that most of you lock your doors when you are not at home. Some of you buy security protection so that a break in can be detected at your home and the police is automatically notified. So you think you are protected from robberies?

Would you lose your bank account numbers, social security number, and your other private information on the telephone pole down the street? Would you make public your income tax forms by placing it on the internet? I bet you would not do that intentionally but many of you have done just that.  

You think that organized crime does nothing but sell drugs, get involved in prostitution, or smuggle illegal things in and out of the country. You have to get out of the 19^th and early 20^th century in your thinking.  You no longer live in your local community. You no longer can view your community as your neighborhood, your city, town, or village. Being of the computer age, your community is the world. Unfortunately, a world community comes with world crime organizations.

Do you know that you are now likely to be robbed by someone in Asia, Europe, or Africa? The FBI or other law enforcement agencies cannot go after these criminals because the US does not have treaties with the countries where they hide. You can be like the citizens of Georgia and file your state income taxes. Because the state of Georgia did not have a security scan phase as part of their Application Development Life Cycle, most of the state’s taxpayers had their banking, social security numbers, addresses, and other personal information stolen by criminals living in Europe. This could lead to thousands having identity theft problems.  A security check of the computer systems in the state of Utah also showed a high security risk to its taxpayers. What you can do here is contact your state representatives and demand that they make security scans part of their Application Development Life Cycle. This would be a long way to protecting your personal information from theft. 

My daughter loves these new phones that come out every year. She is always the first person to buy one. Someone offered to give me a new phone because they were up grading. I refused and they could not figure out why. What most people do not know is that your phone is now a minicomputer that has to be programed. Just like criminals can place hidden codes inside government computers, they can do the same thing with your cell phone.  You contact your bank using the latest cell phone apps  you are giving control of your banking transactions to unknown parties. These parties can copy your banking information and take over your banking identity. You do not have to have a banking app for you to be robbed by using your cell phone. Just by using apps that have not been taken through an Application Life Cycle with a security phase in it can cost you, the customer, serious money.  

I bought something off the internet using my credit card. Somewhere along the transaction path, someone from China got my credit card number. I have very sophisticated security checks on all my banking products. The banks can tell where I am just by tracking my transactions. The bank called me as soon as they saw that I bought a plane ticket in Northern China. Since I was in Harrisburg, Pa. they knew it was not me and canceled by ticket and my bank card. But most people can’t afford to buy such security protect like I have.  So what you must do is use bank cards and other services that have free theft protection services. You have to make this a priority when purchasing products that use the internet.

To show you how serious this problem is, IBM Corporation employs 14,000 people worldwide that look at making the use of the internet a priority. Even today, many companies do not do that.

Criminals can use your local online newspaper to get your personal information. For example, CNN uses space on their pages to sell to advertisers. These advertisers use a third party to put the ads on the page. These third parties are a target for these online criminals. They place a code in these ads. You click on the ads and unknown to you, criminal code is downloaded to your computer. That code steals your personal information and through the internet, sends it to the criminals. You know nothing about it. The same with these internet games that you play. You play and they steal your information.