Fraud

By Eamon Murphy
Daily Finance

The money (left) and control/neutral (right) pictures used to "prime" participants in one study of how money influences moral outcomes. The mere thought of money can trigger a subconscious mindset that predisposes people towards unethical actions, according to recent research by professors at Harvard and the University of Utah.

Earlier work suggested that subtle exposure to money can influence behavior and decisions in self-centered ways, making people in studies more likely to choose an individual activity over a group one, for instance. This new research set out to to determine how such exposure might impact "morally relevant outcomes," in light of money's enormous importance to society in general and business organizations in particular.

Oh what a tangled web we weave when we practice to make personal gain from taxpayer money. Canadian politics has been rocked in recent weeks by revelations from the Senate expenses scandal. Already, four Senators have resigned from their respective caucuses and the Prime Minister's chief of staff fell on his sword for cutting a personal cheque to cover Senator Mike Duffy's inaccurate living expense claims. Alas, political expense scandals are not uncommon but they are invariably entertaining and, as a taxpayer, infuriating. Here are five of the most egregious expense scandals so far this century.

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By Claire Gordon
AOL Jobs

When NSA contractor Edward Snowden reportedly blew the whistle on two enormous government surveillance programs, he did it old-school, leaking documents to two esteemed reporters. But a recent report finds that more whistle-blowers are publishing the secrets themselves -- online (like the infamous hackers of Anonymous, pictured right). This leaves them vulnerable to employer-retaliation as the laws lag behind the new realities of cyberspace.

Miriam Cherry, a professor at Saint Louis University School of Law and author of the report, calls them "virtual whistle-blowers." Unlike past generations, they're blogging, dropping surreptitious videos onto YouTube or leaking documents to online groups such as WikiLeaks, as Bradley Manning allegedly did. Cherry points to a growing army of "whistle-bloggers," employees who blog -- usually anonymously -- about illegal activities at their places of work. No state so far, she notes, has whistle-blower laws on the books to explicitly protect bloggers -- let alone the people who post YouTube videos or leak to Wikileaks.

By Matt Brownell
Daily Finance

Earlier this month, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging several men with bank theft on massive scale. According to prosecutors, the thieves loaded stolen account data onto magnetic stripe cards, which they then used to steal $45 million from ATMs around the world.

As financial institutions reconsider their security procedures in the wake of the breach, much of the attention will naturally fall on America's reliance on magnetic-stripe cards, instead of the more secure chip-and-PIN (also called EMV) cards used in other parts of the world.

While they're at it, though, the banks should also consider another big security black eye: The fact that it's easier to hack into your bank account than it is to crack your Facebook account.

Moms will go to any lengths to ensure their family's well-being. Unfortunately, scammers know that too. So under the guise of helping, they'll go to equally great lengths to part moms from their cash. This Mother's Day -- and every day -- be on the lookout for these common scams that often target mothers and other caregivers.

With more than 900 million users, Mark Zuckerberg's expanding social media empire has become a seemingly irreplaceable part of the online experience. Unfortunately, a byproduct of its success is that millions of Americans are far more at risk of falling victim to a number of cyber crimes.

To be sure, cyber crime is nothing new, but the social media revolution has made such crimes much easier to commit. People have "friends" they've never met; they make personal information widely available. And Facebook's hundreds of millions of users are a rich pool of targets.

According to an infographic published earlier this year by ZoneAlarm, a leading Internet security software provider, "roughly 4 million Facebook users experience spam on a daily basis, 20% of Facebook users have been exposed to malware," and Facebook receives 600,000 reports of hijacked log-ins every day.

Malware represents another growing threat for Facebook users, Dr. Kent Seamons, assistant professor in the computer science department at Brigham Young University said. "Hackers get malware on your machine and get tens if not hundreds of thousands of these machines under their control and then they rent them out to spammers and others," Seamons explains.

These rented accounts can then be used to advertise products illicitly or to request money from unsuspecting friends.

Ultimately, all social media sites make it easier for criminals to deceive their victims. According to a study published in Communications of ACM, a journal for computing professionals, the percentage of students that responded to a phishing email increased from 16% to 72% when the email included relevant social information about the target. Quite simple, scams that make it appear that a message comes from a friend make it more likely that the target will respond.

These are nine of the ways criminals use Facebook:

By Muneeza Iqbnal
Daily Finance

Based on a spate of unusual robberies around the world recently, thieves aren't just money-hungry anymore -- they're plain hungry. These sticky-fingered felons have avoided robbing banks and instead made off with mass quantities of foodstuffs, from soup to Nutella. Here's a rundown of some of the tastier capers we've seen lately:

Erin Marquis of AOL Autos is a resident of Detroit, and she regularly fills up her car's tank at gas stations in the Motor City. On multiple occasions, the simple act of getting gas in her hometown has led to her debit card being frozen by her credit union, which suspected that someone had stolen her card.

After the third time this happened, she called up the credit union and asked them to knock it off.

"I finally told them if my card is stolen in Detroit, I'd call them, but they should stop blocking my card every time I paid for something in a new part of the city," she says.
Credit card issuers regularly issue fraud alerts and freeze accounts when they suspect that someone has stolen your credit card or card number. And while those systems regularly catch fraudsters before they can do too much damage, they also occasionally trip up law-abiding cardholders, who are left to wonder why their attempt to buy a TV, or just 10 gallons of regular, has sent their bank into panic mode.

Credit card banks are understandably reluctant to disclose the precise criteria they use to detect fraud, but we were able to find out what sorts of purchases tend to set off your bank's alarm bells. Here are a few of the warning signs they look for.

By Matt Brownell
Daily Finance

Businesses get in trouble all the time for trying to pass off counterfeit items as the real thing. But in a strange reversal, a few retailers have been busted for selling real fur, but claiming that it was fake.

The US Federal Trade Commission announced Tuesday that three companies -- Neiman Marcus, DrJays.com and Revolve Clothing -- had agreed to settle charges that they misrepresented real fur products as faux fur. Several products were involved in the fur scandal, including Burberry jackets, Eryn Brinie vests, and some boots and shoes.