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I recieved a call on Friday from a close relative who was very distraught because someone had cleared out his checking account using his debit card information.  He was paid on Thursday and on Friday his checking account was empty.  He could not buy groceries for his family, couldn’t pay a bill, and wouldn’t even have gas money to get to work this week.  He realized that he had been robbed when he went to the grocery store and tried swiping his debit card and was told that he didn’t have enough money in the bank to cover the transaction.

According to news reports the problem of debit card fraud is widespread. There are ways to protect yourself so that you don’t find yourself in the same position as my relative.

How Debit Card Fraud Happens:

A thief watches as you enter the PIN and subsequently distracts you and steals your debit card.

In order for fraud to occur, a thief needs both your PIN and the magnetic stripe information on the back of your card. The PIN is not stored on the card’s magnetic stripe. So, if your card is stolen or duplicated, the thief has to find some way to get your PIN. Common methods used to steal or duplicate cards and obtain the PIN are:

1. Easily identified PINs – Your purse or wallet is stolen and the thief finds your PIN written down somewhere close to your card, or, successfully tries a commonly used PIN, such as your birth date, based on information found in your wallet. In this instance, you would be liable for your loss.
2. Surf and Pick Pocket – A thief watches as you enter the PIN and subsequently distracts you and steals your debit card.
3. Card Jam – Various devices are used to jam your card in the bank machine. After your card becomes jammed, a helpful stranger suggests that you try to input your PIN a few times, but the card remains stuck. After you leave, they remove your card and have your PIN.
4. Skim and Clone (Transaction is sent to the financial institution) – There have been cases of equipment being set up at a business to illegally collect your PIN and card information. For example, when you hand over your card to make a purchase, the card is run through a device that sends your magnetic stripe information to the financial institution. The person then swipes the card a second time to record the information into a hidden device which allows them to make a duplicate of the card. At the same time, a camera records your PIN information.
5. Bogus machines (Transaction is not sent to the financial institution) – A bogus machine, that replaces the real PIN Pad, lifts your card and PIN information and issues a transaction receipt but does not actually send the transaction to the FI. The implicated employee covers your purchase by putting cash in the till so that the owner is unaware of any fraud since the outlet’s books balance. At a future date, the employee uses the stolen data to create a card to empty the funds from your bank account. The evidence of the fraud could be that you have a transaction receipt (if indeed you received one) for a purchase but the purchase does not appear on your bank statement.
6. Handing your card over to pay for a transaction and not getting the receipt.  Unfortunately, you  just left a paper trail and if the cashier watched you enter your pin number, they now have access to your account.

There are some things you can do to protect yourself from debit card fraud.

• Protect Your Social Security Number. Do not put your social security number on any document that is not legally required. Never give your social security number, bank information, or debit card number to anyone over the phone.
• Pick Up New Checks at the Bank. Do not allow them to be mailed to your mail box where they can be stolen. If you are expecting a new debit card or credit card, insist that they be sent they be sent certified or overnight express mail so that they will not be sitting in the mail box.
• Shred Important Papers. Shred any paper that contains bank information, credit card information, or anything that contains your social security number.
• Check Your Credit Report Every 6 Months. Make sure there isn’t any activity or new accounts showing that you did not authorize.
• When creating passwords or PINs, do not use the last 4 digits of your social security number. Make your passwords unique and use a combination of letters and numbers. Do not reveal your password to anyone. If you write passwords down, keep the paper in a lock box or safe.

Knowing a bit more about how this type of fraud occurs may help you to protect yourself and your checking account.

Thought our readers might find this interesting. So, check it out here:

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?id=237

We all know the story about the lil Princess who kisses the frog and he turns into a Prince, right?  Evidently, some of us actually took that story to heart, and believed it, because there sure is a lot frog kissing going on.  So, I am here to set the story straight.  Go ahead and sit down, because the truth ”ain’t” pretty.  

Many women like to kiss frogs.  Some even become chronically attracted to them after kissing so many of them. They see so much good in them. They are often quite charming.  They often exude lots of charisma, power and strength. They promise you the sun, moon, and stars.  Never mind that they also excel at hopping from “lily pad” to “lily pad” with the greatest of ease, and deliver so much pain, anguish and suffering. The words they say sound so good.

Unfortunately, until we fix whatever is broken within our own selves, we will continue to attract and kiss frogs. Even after we have dealt with those characteristics, we still may have an attraction for frogs, but we won’t allow ourselves to be drowned in the pond with them. 

In a nutshell, beware of frogs. They don’t don’t turn into princes. They only make a princess feel like a toad.

I am extremely concerned about the dire straits of our Country’s economy, and even more so after listening to Suze Orman last night say that what we are experiencing is as becoming as serious as the Great Depression that our grandparents lived through.  All signs are pointing that we are heading in that direction with the folding of Merrill Lynch, the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, the government bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac earlier in the month,  and now the AIG with 85 billion dollars of the tax payers money. This is the second time in a very short span of time that the government has stepped in to prevent AIG’s collapse! If they were to fold the effects would be felt global wide.

In case you are wondering what the difference is between a recession and an economic depression, there’s an old joke that states: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job.”  A more detailed explaination can be found at Wikipedia.

If we ever had blinders on in regard to state of our economy, now is the time to take them off, hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.  So, what are some things we can do now in the event that the worst may happen?  The articles “How to Survive Total Economic Collapse” and “How to Store Food for Long Term Survival” are well worth reading.  I encourage you to do so. The suggestions there are going to be a bit tough to follow, but it’s definetly time to tighten our belts and learn how to live a lot differently, in order to be ready for the tough times ahead. Oh, and one more thing, if you don’t know how to cook from “scratch” now is the time to learn.

I encourage all of you to share any links that you find on surviving in difficult times, and please share your thoughts on this topic in the comment section.

(I realize from the jump start that this post is going to be controversial. Even so, I am going to exercise my right to freedom of speech, and express my own thoughts. You are also encouraged to express yours in the comment section.) 

I don’t think it was surprising that McCain chose a female as his running mate.  After all, he was well aware that there was a close race between Obama and Hillary, and McCain was hoping to attract all of those disappointed Democrats who wanted Hillary to join forces with him. 

What is shocking is that of all the females he could have chosen as his running mate, he chose Palin.  After all his bashing comments about Obama and his “inexperience,” McCain chooses someone who is extremely inexperienced and unknown.  The Governor of Alaska.  Alaska has a population of about 670,000.  And if it were not for the shameless antics of it’s congressional delegation, most of us in the lower 48 states would not think of Alaska more than a couple times a year.

So what else do we know of Palin?  Not much!  We know the following:

• She was a hockey mom.
• She was in the PTA.
• She attempted to impose her personal literary values on the public library in Wasilla, AK.
• She did support the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.”
• She did have a non-trivial opinion about the war in Iraq.
• She did seek to dismiss a state employee for improper reasons.
• She wants to take the polar bear off the endangered species list.
• She wants to take women’s rights back to the stone ages, so that we have teenagers dying in a back alley somewhere from using coat hangers for self inflicted abortions.
• She does not believe that humans have done a thing to cause global warming.
• McCain offered the veep slot after just one substantive meeting with her — a stunning way to make the most important decision of your life, after selecting your spouse! And speaking of marriage, would anyone in their right mind propose on the first date? No! But he offers her this crucial position based on some mild staff vetting and then just one meeting?
• The conservative Christian right did the same thing as McCain and has fallen head-over-heels in love with her virtually overnight. Why? Because they do not like McCain, are not happy with what the Bush presidency devolved into, and most importantly, they want very much to believe in someone. ANYONE.

In a nutshell, McCain was grasping for straws, and obviously did not give a lot of thought when choosing someone to fill such an important position.  I think that alone says a great deal about McCain in and of itself. If McCain were to win this election, and something were to happen to him, would you want Palin as your President?  Who in their right mind would vote for this pair?

McCain may have dressed up his campaign by choosing a pretty, fresh, female face as his running mate, but it does nothing to change the fact that he is incapable of turning this country around and making the changes that are necessary to get our country back on her feet, restore her dignity, and re-gain the respect she once knew the world over. McCain has stated himself that he has been President Bush’s “yes man” by backing him in all of his decisions “90 percent of the time.”  Do we really need 4 more years of the same old thing?  Can we afford it?

Obama was not making a direct insult to the beautiful Palin when he made the statement that putting lipstick on a pig still makes it a pig. He was merely stating that just because you pick a beautiful woman as your running mate does not change what you stand for, or make you the right man for the job.  Obama’s other comment in reference to the same thing went unannounced over the media, when he stated:

“You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It’s still gonna stink.”