What PinPoint is not telling you when they want you to sign-up with them and pay $6.95 a month is that your credit card company already provides this. Chase, for example will call you if you have made purchases in other states or made too many large purchases. The card companies look at your geographic location but they do not need you to slow down your cell phone with an app to do this.

Another reason PinPoint is not worth your time is because when you purchase something online it will not be in the location of where you are. This is because online businesses may have their processing center far from their store address or it could be with a company like Paypal that is not exacly local.

Most of these add-on credit card or debit fraud detections are worthless and a hassle you do not need. Even though the PinPoint service is Free with just one card it is not worth your time.

Mint.com, a company recently bought by Quicken responded with the following statement:

A flood of emails were recently sent from
stage-mini@mint.com to some Mint users.
It was a misconfiguration with our email provider causing blank emails to go out.

This was not a security breach and no data was
compromised. We are putting measures in place to ensure this never happens again.

We apologize for the inconvenience it may have caused you.

Sincerely,
The Mint Team

Everything seems to be fine in our Mint.com account and hopefully nothing is really tampered with by some bad employees. It just goes to show the scare that goes on when we give out data to a website and using apps on an iPhone or a Blackberry and then turn around and either worry or feel safe that they will take care of our information. The bottom line is to be cautious of any data you give sites and the passwords.

If you are worried of storing information on your computer because it could get stolen by id thieves this is one more step to take.  We seem to live in the day of big brother where we have to track our own devices just to make sure our own money does not get stolen from right under us.  Then again you have to decide which is best for you — tracking of your laptop or the security of knowing your id is that much more protected.

The best thing to do when your laptop or device such as an Iphone is stolen is to make sure the data is destroyed. Data such as password information and notes you have on your computer could really hurt your identity.

More information on this gadget tracker can be found here.  Read more on id theft and the hassles we face on this blog.

Today I almost fell prey again to an email that made it through my spam mail to my inbox.  It was asking for a survey that only takes two minutes and I would get twenty bucks added to my bank account at Capital One.  I just happened to have a Capital One bank account so I thought this was legit until I looked over the URL.

Some surveys redirect to third party sites so that is common but the fact that it redirected to a Verizon site that looked to be someones personal site I became weiry.  The URL for a Capital One survey went to a Mysite.Verizon.net.  That seems strange and I would advise anyone stay far away from even clicking on this link.

Dear Customer ,

The Capital One Bank Online department kindly asks you to take part in our quick and easy 5 questions survey. In return we will credit $20.00 to your account – Just for your time!

With the information collected we can decide to direct a number of changes to improve and expand our services. The information you provide us is all non-sensitive and anonymous – No part of it is handed down to any third party.

It will be stored in our secure database for maximum 7 days while we process the results of this nationwide survey. We kindly ask you to spare two minutes of your time and take part in our online survey.

I also noticed something else “phishy” about this email.  The copyright line at the bottom said members instead of member.

Capital One Bank (USA), N.A. and Capital One, N.A., members FDIC.

One more thing noticeable about this email scam is the FROM.  It says capitalsurvey@securenet.com instead of the URL that the link points to.  I would suggest not only looking over the URL that the emails link to before filling out any personal credit information by mousing over the link (not clicking on the link).  Also, check out the reply-to and from email headers.

The mortgage industry is already in enough hot water and this will just make it worse for companies such as CountryWide, LendingTree, and LowerMyBills. You can expect some big laws to come down harsh on the mortgage industry and extensive employee evaluations when hiring.

If Lending Tree does make this announcement it will be a big issue.  Another reminder that you should regularly obtain a credit report to see who could be selling your identity behind your back.  It is sad that you cannot trust some sites even with a privacy policy such as Lending Tree because their employees could be selling your Social Security Number and private information in the background.

I assume that the problem could be worse if you go in person to apply for a loan since your papers are sitting out for anyone to see going through different offices and filing systems.  I am still a believer in doing things online securely and safely and this will blow over in time.

The trick is that if you answer the security questions the same on every site that you end up doing the same thing wrong as answering passwords on all the log-ins the same.  You want most of your secure log-ins to be different.  The problem is that there is no human way to remember all of these passwords and security questions for each banking, brokerage, bill payment, and credit card site.

You have to try and remember what you typed in for your first road your drove on, the first elementary school teacher, the hospital you were born in, and maybe even the name of the diaper brand your parents used on you.  I could go on and mention the name of your first pet or the one you picked could it have been your dogs name or the cats name or that horse your uncle owned.

Roboform comes in handy for the passwords but there is nothing that comes in to help for the security questions unless you somehow manipulate Roboform to do this.  If you have a Mac there is a 1Password and I have yet to find a way to answer security questions within that software.

TD Ameritrade sent an email this week saying that security questions were coming and that we needed four to log-in to their new system.  Emigrant Direct has a picture to recognize, a security question, and a birth date question.  The most annoying is HSBC Direct Banking where you have to use the mouse to put in your security word instead of typing it in and im sure this will catch on to other paranoid banks.

There is a problem with Identity Theft, phishing, and stolen passwords online but that is mostly due to using virus contaminated computers, going to fraudulent log-in pages by not making sure they say “https://”, and other avoidable instances.   The banks and credit companies already have highly secure sites that in most cases its not likely anyone can steal your information if you use Roboform where you normally do not have to type any passwords because it fills it in for you.

The personal and business finance companies need to back off with all the security because soon we will not be looking for lower interest rates or credit offers but for sites that do not take more than ten minutes to see our information.