Interview with a Nigerian email scammer

If you have ever wondered about those email scams that always seem to originate in Nigeria, here is an interview with someone who claims to be a former scammer. The author was not able to corroborate the story due to the subject’s desire to remain anonymous, but the story sure is intriguing!

Toyota: Another Lesson in Concentration Risk

Toyota Motor Corporation has been one of the most respected automakers in the world. It is widely admired for making high-quality cars, and for being a profitable operation, while its American counterparts for the most part have run themselves into the ground. If you were going to own stock in an automaker, this likely would have been high on the list of candidates.

But the recent recall of millions of its cars due to serious safety concerns has rather suddenly hung a dark cloud over the company. As James Stewart points out in his Wall Street Journal article, it’s not just current profits that are at risk - the company’s reputation is on the line as well. Sales have already been adversely impacted and there is speculation that the company’s woes have not been completely revealed at this point. As of this writing, Toyota stock has lost nearly 25% of its value in not much more than a week. Toyota is not going out of business, but its shareholders certainly have cause to be nervous.

This episode is a great reminder of the importance of diversification and avoiding the needless risk of being concentrated in a single stock. No matter how “safe” an individual stock seems - because of the nature of its industry, its management, or how well the investor thinks he knows the company - there is always the risk of a negative event that can severely or mortally wound a company. And they often appear to be doing just fine right before it happens.

Tips for Preventing Identity Theft

I have recently been helping a client go through the process of recovering from identity theft and subsequent fraud. Our clients have been fortunate for the most part to avoid becoming victims, but I can now say from firsthand experience with the hassles of the aftermath that a few ounces of prevention are worth a ton of cure. 

Here is my “Top 10 List” of some relatively simple tips for protecting your identity and your financial world from fraud: 

1. Protect your Social Security number. Don’t carry the card in your wallet and don’t print the number on your checks. Don’t use it or any part of it for user names or passwords. Not too long ago, it was common practice to have your Social Security number as the ID number on driver’s licenses and health insurance cards. In Virginia, that is no longer the case. If you have the option to use an alternative identification number, do it.
2. Limit the information that is printed on your checks – do not include your driver’s license number or Social Security number.
3. Consider a credit bureau lock-down. You can contact the three major credit bureaus - Equifax, Experian and TransUnion – and have them put fraud alerts on your credit records. For a fee, firms like Lifelock and Identity Guard will do that for you, along with some other add-on services intended to protect your credit and identity from fraud.
4. Review your credit report at least annually. Request free copies from the big three credit reporting agencies at www.annualcreditreport.com and review the credit reports for inaccuracies.
5. Thwart dumpster divers with a shredder. Your trash can be a goldmine of information for an identity thief. Any documents that contain sensitive personal information such as your Social Security number, account numbers, driver’s license number, or signature should be shredded before you throw them out. Use one that does cross-cut/confetti style as opposed to strips. Modern shredders can handle credit cards and CDs as well.
6. Review your monthly bank and credit card statements, looking for unauthorized transactions. If you see anything suspicious, contact the financial institution.
7. No phishing. “Phishing” involves pretending to be a financial institution or other company you do business with and sending an email or creating pop-up messages to get you to reveal your personal information. This has gone on for years but until recently the fake messages were easy to spot by their broken English. These days they are much more difficult to detect as fakes.
   
   If you are contacted by phone or email, always verify a source before sharing your information. Don’t open the links in the messages. Instead, type the web address into the browser yourself to ensure you are indeed going to the site you intended.
8. Use multiple passwords, use strong passwords, and change them regularly. Instead of using your initials and date of birth for every account and web site, consider using multiple passwords comprised of upper and lower case letters, and numbers. And then change them every couple of months.
9. On your personal computer, keep your antivirus and anti-malware software up to date. Most software has the option to automatically download the most current virus files on a weekly basis, and this is necessary given the proliferation of software viruses out there.
10. Shop online carefully. Use trusted vendors and look for the padlock icon in your browser; this designates a secure site that will encrypt your information that you transmit across the internet.

Money Saving Tip: Energy Efficiency Tax Credit

As a provision of the American Recovery and reinvestment Act, the federal government is providing an economic incentive for you to make improvements to your home’s energy efficiency. 

The incentive comes in the form of a tax credit of up to 30% of the purchase price of certain items, such as water heaters, furnaces, insulation, etc. The credit is limited to $1,500 and is for improvements made in 2010. 

The highlights of the program are available at the IRS web site. A list of eligible items is located on the EnergyStar website and a list of answers to frequently-asked questions is located here. 

If you have an eligible purchase that you have been putting off, this tax credit might make it worth it to go ahead and do it this year, and let the government help pay for it.

Career Next Step

There are a lot of people out there who are either unemployed, “under-employed”, or employed but wishing they could do something different to earn a living. It can be easy to short-circuit the job search due to a sense of desperation to find a new job, or fear of trying something new. How many people who have lost a job they never really liked are now out there looking for a job exactly like their previous one?

A job transition is a great opportunity to take some time to reflect on your skills, interests, and passions, and identify the places where those things intersect with the needs of the marketplace.

There are many tools out there to help you discover more about yourself. A web site called Career Next Step provides access to over a dozen such tools, a framework for compiling the various results to identify themes and insights, and matching those themes to career options.

The process is based on a “career management” course taught at Virginia’s Darden School of Business and is run by the professor that developed the course. I took the actual course years ago and it was extremely valuable in my own life. I have not tried the web-based version, but for less than $200 I think it would provide valuable insights to someone seeking a change of vocation.