Life Events...
1. You don’t have an up-to-date will.
2. You don’t understand the difference between
a trust and a will.
3. Family members challenge your parent’s will.
4. You don’t understand your health insurance
plan or the new Medicare Prescription Act.
5. The IRS selects you for an audit.
6. Your parents die and leave you executor
of their estate.
7. You are tired of hidden cell phone fees.
8. You do not have a retirement savings plan.
9. You lose your personal identification.
10. You receive a speeding ticket.
11. You are buying or selling
your home.
12. Your driver’s license is
suspended.
13. Your landlord raises rent in
violation of your verbal
agreement.
14. Your teenager is accused of shoplifting.
15. You decide to change your name.
16. Your new washing machine doesn’t wash.
17. Creditors threaten to take action against you
for your ex-spouse’s debts.
18. A neighbor or school reports you for child abuse.
19. You adopt a child.
20. A friend or neighbor is injured on your property.
21. You need child support enforced.
22. A friend owes you money and files bankruptcy.
23. A stranger calls and demands money or damaging
information will be released.
24. Your car is damaged by a hit-and-run driver.
25. You accidentally back over a neighbor’s garbage can.
26. A hairdresser damages your hair with harsh chemicals.
27. Your car is repossessed unjustly.
28. You are subpoenaed or served with legal papers.
29. You are called to jury duty.
30. Your long drive off the tee injures another player.
31. You need a lease agreement reviewed.
32. Your son is injured in a football game.
33. A neighbor trips over a rake in your yard.
34. A jeweler sells you defective merchandise.
35. A car dealership gains illegal access to your
credit history.
36. You are hit by a bottle at a baseball game.
37. A tenant falls down stairs and sues you.
38. You need help with credit card liability resolution.
39. You are injured when you slip on a wet floor in
a public building.
40. Your livestock trample a neighbor’s garden.
41. Your neighbor’s dog barks for hours every night.
42. Your teenager gets a speeding ticket.
43. Your landlord enters your apartment without permission.
44. Your child throws a baseball through a neighbor’s
car window.
45. You don’t have a Living Will or Medical Power of Attorney.
46. Your boat is damaged while in storage.
47. Your landlord refuses to refund your cleaning deposit.
48. You lose an expensive watch in a hotel and the manager
denies liability.
49. A speeding car nicks your car bumper because you
have parked in the street.
50. A merchant refuses to honor a guarantee.
51. You have an accident driving your friend’s boat.
52. Your spouse claims a right to your earnings.
53. A record or book club sends merchandise after you cancel
your membership.
54. You are refused service at a restaurant.
55. A property manager refuses to rent to you.
56. You are denied credit for no apparent reason.
57. An online auction goes sour.
58. The auto repair shop threatens
small claims court for money
you don’t owe.
59. Your car insurance is cancelled
when your teenager is involved
in an accident.
60. Your child needs special
education in public school.
61. You made a sizable gift to charity.
62. Angry words result in a slander law suit.
63. You need a patent for an invention.
64. You need a copyright for your
manuscript.
65. You are wrongly accused of
committing a crime.
66. Your right to privacy has been
invaded.
67. Your car is vandalized in a
parking lot.
68. A postal carrier slips on your unshoveled walk and
breaks his or her leg.
69. You have questions about escrow in a home purchase.
70. You are stopped for speeding and a friend is in
possession of marijuana.
71. Your teenager wrecks the car and a friend is injured.
72. You care for your elderly parents.
73. You receive social security disability or medicaid.
74. You are cheated by a door-to-door salesman.
75. A repairman charges more than a given estimate.
76. A creditor tries illegal collection tactics.
77. An accident results in a personal injury.
78. You are scheduled to appear
in small claims court.
79. Your new house has bad plumbing and a leaky roof.
80. You take a vacation and your “room with a view” is a
view of the trash dumpster.
81. A minor is caught breaking into your home.
82. You have a fender bender while driving a friend’s car.
83. You have liability questions in launching a new business.
84. You have a question about an easement on your property.
85. Your neighbor’s dog bites your child.
86. You have a property line dispute over a newly installed fence.
87. You’re asked to testify as a witness to a crime.
88. You need a premarital agreement.
89. You’re buying or selling a car.
90. Your child’s school demands a drug or alcohol test.
91. Your bank sends a foreclosure notice after one house
payment is late.
92. A retail store won’t accept the return of defective merchandise.
93. A repairman won’t stand behind his work.
94. A trespasser is caught poaching on your land.
95. You are leasing property.
96. You receive a letter from a creditor and it is not your debt.
97. A bank turns you into a credit bureau unjustly.
98. You need advice concerning a divorce.
99. You own your own small business.
100. You can’t make heads or tails out of the new tax forms.
101. Your spouse uses physical force against you.
Our product is “Your Life Events Legal Plan
®
”.
This means the Pre-Paid Legal membership isn’t only a
“fix” for sudden and unforeseen events. The plan is designed
to provide the common legal services our members
need throughout the course of their lives. In essence the
“Life Events” nature of our legal plan actually encourages
members to call their provider law firms when life happens
and legal counsel is essential. Members walk through
events more confident and with less stress. The plan offers
features to help when life gets more complicated as well.
Our network of Pre-Paid Legal Provider Attorneys stand
ready and available to assist our Members beginning the
very day they sign up. It’s a NOW benefit, and one of the
most powerful elements of what we provide is this immediate
access to legal counsel on an unlimited number of issues.
There are no claim forms, no deductibles, no lists of
attorneys to guess about, no yellow pages, simply toll-free
direct access to a law firm.
Your Life Events Legal Plan
®
Monday, September 27, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
Today's Tip Prevent Identity Theft When Working from Home
Posted by: Today's Tip Contributor on September 16, 2010
Today’s criminals are attacking home computers to make money by stealing your personal information. For stay-at-home small business owners, this could include your client’s information as well, which would be devastating for your business and reputation.As phishing and other types of attacks become less effective, criminals are moving on to more sophisticated techniques, such as installing a "keylogger" on your computer that captures everything you type (including passwords) or infecting your computer with a Trojan virus that gives them complete unauthorized access to your computers.
A good practice, especially for professionals working from home, is to apply the security solution in layers, so that if one element fails or is disabled by the criminal, you are still protected. You need to take these steps on all the computers in your home network to be fully protected:
1. Anti-virus and anti-spyware protection should be updated regularly, and you should perform regular scans of you system, since criminals can disable this software and you may not even know it is happening.
2. Ensure your operating system, plug-ins, and all applications are patched and up-to-date, as criminals look for weaknesses in common software to exploit and take over your system.
3. Do not open files or e-mails sent to you by strangers, or click on hyperlinks or download programs from websites you don’t know and trust. Be especially careful of clicking on shortened URLs and links on Twitter and Facebook, as these have become an increasingly popular way for criminals to spread online threats. Currently a scam to add a "dislike" button to Facebook is being spread by users that click on the link.
4. Properly configure firewall programs or enable the firewall on your home router to stop uninvited access to your computers. But don’t forget to keep this firewall software, your modem software, and your router software up-to-date as well.
5. And finally, you should have a security layer that analyzes your network traffic to provide protection when your anti-virus and other security precautions do not. Ask your ISP if it has a network-based security service that provides this additional layer of protection against identity theft and other online threats.
Brendan Ziolo
Vice-president of marketing
Kindsight
Sunnyvale, Calif.
Criminals Prey on the Unemployed
Scammers Use Online Ads to Con Desperate Job Seekers into 'Mule' Operations
By SIOBHAN GORMAN
Out of work for six months, Mary Long spent hours each day surfing the Web. She found a job listing this fall for a logistics manager that paid $65,000 a year and fired off her resume.But the company, Advanta Transportation Network LLC, appears to be part of an increasingly common scam that has snared Ms. Long and many others, according to cybercrime experts.
Matt Nager/Wall Street Journal Mary Long fell into a shipping scam when she answered an online job ad.
These operations generally follow a formula, say security experts: Cybercriminals post an ad on a job board. Successful job applicants are "hired" or asked to complete a trial project. Scam operators wire stolen money to the applicant's credit card and applicants are asked to purchase such goods as expensive electronics. The applicant ships the goods, often to Eastern Europe, where scam operators sell them. Applicants end up with neither a job nor a paycheck.
Advanta used this approach, according to cyber experts who have reviewed the company's activities. Several attempts to reach Advanta for comment were unsuccessful.
"In the last couple of years, [the growth in mule schemes] has been tremendous," said Uri Rivner, chief of cybercrime technologies at RSA, the security division of EMC Corp., an information-technology company. "The bad economy has a lot to do with pushing this type of thing."
There are few statistics on this underground economy. But federal law enforcement has started to track such scams in the past couple of years and they now number in the hundreds, one federal law-enforcement official said.
The number of active scams tracked by the leading Web site that monitors them, bobbear.co.uk, grew from 34 in December 2007 to 591 in December 2009. This Web site has become a leading source of data on mule schemes since it began tracking them in 2006 to draw the attention of authorities. U.S. law enforcement frequently turns to the site's proprietor, a private cyber-fraud investigator in the U.K., for data.
These operations are recruiting large numbers of Americans, experts say, and often go to great lengths to appear legitimate. Advanta's Web site, for example, showed it used some of the same language as a legitimate Japanese transport company, according to bobbear, and listed offices in Copenhagen, New York, London, and Hong Kong. The networking site Linked-In had a profile of David A. Maeweather, who is listed as the company's special projects supervisor.
Advanta's Web site is no longer functioning, and emails sent to several Advanta managers, including Mr. Maeweather, were returned undeliverable. The toll-free phone number for the New York office led to a marketing firm based in Texas that said it was recently assigned the number but has no affiliation with Advanta. The four company offices had no address listings in city business directories.
Advanta appears to have been succeeded by an outfit, likely run by the same criminal group, according to bobbearco.uk, called A-Cape Transportation LLC. A-Cape's Web site bears a resemblance to Advanta's, including the same addresses for its four global offices and lists a similar set of transport services. Phone and email messages to the numbers listed for A-Cape weren't returned.
A federal law-enforcement official said he couldn't speak about Advanta specifically, but said authorities have seen these types of fraudulent transactions fueling other cybercrime operations.
Federal authorities don't often target specific mule Web site operations because the same criminal group can launch 50 or more such sites a year. Instead of engaging in a whack-a-mole effort to shutter each Web operation, they collect intelligence to figure out what group is behind a collection of sites and go after the group, cybersecurity specialists said.
Ms. Long said that about a month after sending her resume to Advanta, she received an email from a human-resources officer at the company, outlining a long screening process. The screening required weeks of online tests, in-person training, and a "credit score over 600 and NO criminal background."
"I was desperate for a job," said Ms. Long, a 50-year-old former executive training coordinator for AT&T, who lives in a suburb of Dallas. "I was more hopeful than I was skeptical."
Ms. Long conducted online searches for Advanta before starting the company's training process in October. She said she found only the company's Web site and the job listing posted on Careerbuilder.com, but decided to give it a try.
A Careerbuilder spokeswoman said the company takes a number of measures to fight ads that appear to be scams, but declined to provide details to avoid tipping off scammers.
Ms. Long said she thought her job would entail customer support for a shipping company. "I thought it was legit," she said.
After some early tests, Ms. Long's contact at Advanta, Mr. Maeweather, asked her to help with a trial project, she said. Advanta would transfer money to her credit card so she could purchase two Apple MacBook laptops and then ship them to an Advanta contact using prepaid labels. She would earn $350 in commission, he told her in an email.
Ms. Long went to purchase the MacBooks at her local Apple Store and discovered that her credit-card company blocked the $5,000 Advanta transfer. Ms. Long's boyfriend, Graham Shevlin, paid for it with his credit card instead, she said.
"Even when we were buying the laptops, I was still thinking this is fine," Ms. Long said. "Bells were not going off."
Ms. Long planned to mail the laptops the next day. But when she and Mr. Shevlin looked at the shipping labels closely that day, the mailing address in Ukraine raised their suspicions.
Mr. Shevlin did some research online that evening and alerted her the next morning that Advanta had recently been listed on bobbear.co.uk as a fraudulent shipping operation for cybercriminals. She didn't ship the computers, she said, and returned them to the store.
Ms. Long alerted the FBI, but hasn't heard back. An FBI spokeswoman said she couldn't speak about specific complaints.
In a phone conversation with a fraud officer at her credit-card company, Capital One Financial Corp., Ms. Long said she was told that the money transfer to her Capital One card had been flagged as fraudulent. The transfer was being made with a stolen Bank of America credit card.
A Capital One spokeswoman, Pam Girardo, confirmed Ms. Long's account. "Anybody who says they want to pay you by putting a transfer on your credit card, that's a big flag," Ms. Girardo said.
Write to Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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