The world of personal finance is getting pretty dicey these days.
It’s so tough we now have a National Consumer Protection Week. (It began Sunday and runs through Saturday.)
And boy, do we need protection.
Every e-mail, telephone call and piece of mail we get has to be scrutinized for any sign of deceit designed to steal our identity.
If you fail to protect your personal financial information, you could be hooked by crooks. I’m not trying to be cute (OK, maybe a little), but one of the newest scams is called "phishing." It’s named that because con artists go fishing for folks’ personal financial information by pretending to be representatives of legitimate companies or government agencies.
In one version of phishing, you might get an e-mail that claims you need to supply personal information to assist in the fight against terrorism. The e-mail claims that bank regulators will suspend the federal insurance on your bank account until you verify key financial data.
In other instances, e-mails purport to come from one of several government agencies such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency or the Securities Investor Protection Corp. The Web sites to which the e-mail recipients are directed are counterfeits of official government sites.
According to the Treasury Department, consumers are asked to click on a link in the e-mail to go to the look-alike Web site. There they are instructed to update personal information, such as name, account and credit card numbers, mother’s maiden name, passwords, Social Security numbers and other information.
If you want to see examples of some of these highly deceptive e-mails, go to www.anti-phishing.org and click on Phishing Archives. The Web site is run by the Anti-Phishing Working Group, an organization of financial service institutions and e-commerce providers. The group was created for the specific purpose of fighting phishing.
In another phishing scam, a telephone caller claims to be calling from a credit card company’s security department. I can see how someone might fall for this. The caller doesn’t ask for your credit card number, which many of you know not to give. Instead, he just asks that you read off the security code on the back of your credit card to verify you have it in hand. These days when making an online or telephone purchase, many companies ask for that security number. A crook might already have your credit card number, but if he doesn’t have your actual credit card, he won’t have the security code.
So how can we consumers protect ourselves?
First, you have to stay in continuing consumer education mode. You can start by going to www.consumer.gov/ncpw,the official site for National Consumer Protection Week. You’ll find a basic personal finance quiz under the Outreach Toolkit link. Take the quiz and see how much you know about personal finance.
You’ll also find links to sites run by groups and government agencies that offer lots of consumer information.
When it comes to the latest phishing scam, follow these tips from the Federal Trade Commission and the FBI:
It’s unfortunate that we have to go through all these steps and be so untrusting. But it’s a must if you want to keep your financial data from falling into the hands of people whose criminal behavior is as disgusting as fish bait.
(c) Washington Post Writers Group
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