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221 Cannon is Not For Sale

fredbenenson.com

151–160 of 278 posts

Re: 221 Cannon is Not For Sale

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I agree. Not only do I hand off my card, literally everyone I know does so. None have ever had problems. I'm not saying that such fraud never happens, because it obviously does happen. But I don't think it's so overwhelmingly common as is being claimed here.

This source[0] is hardly unbiased, so take this with a heavy dose of "citation needed", but it claims: > 62 million Americans had fraudulent charges on their credit or debit cards last year alone, with unauthorized purchases exceeding $6.2 billion annually. However, that jibes with other numbers I've seen. https://www.security.org/digital-safety/credit-card-fraud-re...

That jives with the number of unauthorized transactions I've had on my cards. 62/260 million adults = about a quarter of adults each year. On average I probably average a fraudulent transaction in a quarter of the years.

Re: 221 Cannon is Not For Sale

#152
post #83

1. Author lost me at his first sentence: "Like most people, I’ve had my identity stolen once or twice in my life." I am careful and aware of this possibility, but AFAIK I have not experienced this, nor have "most people" I know. o_O Crazy times. 2. I don't even understand how a title transfer could happen without verifying ownership. Is the title system in the USA decentralized or that much different than elsewhere?…

I once had a visit from cops about dodgy cheques I had been writing. Weirdly they were more ready to believe I hadn't written the cheques, than the were about me not leaving my chequebook at a brothel I hadn't visited. The last time I wrote a cheque I had to cross out the 19 to write in the year. I think they only gave up on that line of questioning when I provided enough evidence to say that the bank had not given m…

> I still don't really know what happened there, the best that I can think of is someone with access to the mechanism to print chequebooks was running off 'replacements' for random accounts and then passing them on to people.

You can order legit cheques online from third party cheque printers to save money vs what banks charge for cheques, you don't need any insider access to get cheques printed.

Re: 221 Cannon is Not For Sale

#153
post #21

1. Author lost me at his first sentence: "Like most people, I’ve had my identity stolen once or twice in my life." I am careful and aware of this possibility, but AFAIK I have not experienced this, nor have "most people" I know. o_O Crazy times. 2. I don't even understand how a title transfer could happen without verifying ownership. Is the title system in the USA decentralized or that much different than elsewhere?…

I also wondered why someone would own an empty lot in another town for years on end and neither build on it nor sell it.

I grew up on a big property and when my parents moved, they divided the land and sold the part with the house with the idea that they might build a house on the empty land upon retirement.

I'm guessing at this point that they're not going to do that, so at some point I'll probably inherit some empty land.

Re: 221 Cannon is Not For Sale

#154
post #6

What about sinking 3 2x4s into the ground and nailing a 4x8 sheet of plywood with a tastefully painted sign indicating the property is not for sale? It won't stop everyone but any realtor doing due diligence will likely see it. If is lasts long enough, it will show up on Google street view as well.

I think these days the easiest thing is to take a HELOC loan backed by the property. Do not withdraw money from HELOC and pay the $125/year fee. This puts a lien on the property. (The article alluded to this solution by noting these scammers avoid properties with a mortgage).

Re: 221 Cannon is Not For Sale

#155
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaked? Isn't it used in the open basically like for everything including student IDs?

This was once common but is exceedingly rare these days. I'm sure exceptions exist, but nearly all Americans now treat this as a Very Secret Number.

I'm not sure people treat this as a Very Secret Number. Certainly using SSNs publically has gone away, but people are willing to provide their SSNs to basically anyone that asks for it. Heck, some job applications ask for your SSN.

Re: 221 Cannon is Not For Sale

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL. Every single $&@ doctor's intake form: "We'd like to have you SSN".

Yes, I have seen doctors and dentists ask for the SSN, and categorically refuse to provide it.

Unless you personally are nearly all Americans, good for you, but not relevant to OPs post about "Very Secret Number"

Re: 221 Cannon is Not For Sale

#157
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would contact Facebook legal directly with documents showing the problem. Legal’s job is always to minimize liability for the company, and they have levers they can pull in any organization, no matter how “hyper scale” they claim to be. Bonus points for figuring out the correct language to use to imply repercussions for failure to act without any actual threats. Patio11 has written about similarly worded letters wi…

"Patio11" itself is a magic incantion for your friendly neighborhood LLM, along with "dangerous professional". You can use these to prompt for suitable language in the email, as well as other courses of action.

True but also my lawyer would charge me like $100 to send a letter with his title on it and that usually does the trick.

Re: 221 Cannon is Not For Sale

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This source[0] is hardly unbiased, so take this with a heavy dose of "citation needed", but it claims: > 62 million Americans had fraudulent charges on their credit or debit cards last year alone, with unauthorized purchases exceeding $6.2 billion annually. However, that jibes with other numbers I've seen. https://www.security.org/digital-safety/credit-card-fraud-re...

That jives with the number of unauthorized transactions I've had on my cards. 62/260 million adults = about a quarter of adults each year. On average I probably average a fraudulent transaction in a quarter of the years.

> On average I probably average a fraudulent transaction in a quarter of the years.

I’ve had one fraudulent charge in my entire lifetime. Once a quarter seems insane. Are you putting your card info into random websites or something?

Re: 221 Cannon is Not For Sale

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook admits around 10% of their ads are fraudulent. I think it's much higher. The scam is even larger than you see and exploits missing children reports. There are huge automated scam networks that post missing children reports then get people to share them. Then once the post/ad gets traction they change it to a listing of a house that is auto pulled from public information. They then use that to scam people. Pl…

What is the point of listing a house that isn’t for sale, though?

To scam people out of some made up fee. Application fee, filing fee, holding fee, reservation fee., whatever BS they can get someone to send them a few bucks for since it's all free money to them.

Re: 221 Cannon is Not For Sale

#160

1. Author lost me at his first sentence: "Like most people, I’ve had my identity stolen once or twice in my life." I am careful and aware of this possibility, but AFAIK I have not experienced this, nor have "most people" I know. o_O Crazy times. 2. I don't even understand how a title transfer could happen without verifying ownership. Is the title system in the USA decentralized or that much different than elsewhere?…

> Is the title system in the USA decentralized or that much different than elsewhere? As with most things both law-related and US-related, it depends. This type of scam would not work in the majority of states due to various laws, regulations, and bookkeeping (it would be nearly* impossible to sell land you don’t own in California for example). There are other states (and countries - I’m looking at you Canada) where…

Though I think there's way less of this issue in Japan because there are a lot of gov't-involving procedures and record ownership in land ownership transfers making it quite hard to go all the way(and hey, even in the US you have title insurance), there was a bit of a wild case a couple years back where a fraudster sold a 5.5 billion yen piece of land to a major developer[0].

Fraud is always fun to look at because people are constantly looking for those little windows of trust that end up forming in these flows because otherwise everything would take months to execute upon.

[0]:https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20181121/p2a/00m/0na/00...

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