Guests?

Axel Slingerland said:
You're lucky. My son doesn't use the internet, and ID thieves nailed him after my daughter failed to change our mailing addresses when we moved, and mail piled up in our old mailbox. But they didn't get anything. That's the one good thing about poor... Nobody can steal what you ain't got.
Click to expand...
Sadly, they can open lines of credit in your name if you don't freeze it. Or just use your card numbers after scanning your butt.
 
If someone wants to steal your identity, they'll hack your bank, the online retailer you do business with, or a government website that has all that stuff. These sites are hacked all the time because that's where the real money is. While it's always good to use caution, I tend to be impatient with people who think that someone is out to steal their soul because a search engine or analytics agency sends a bot out to index a web forum.

Yes, there are dangers online but I have been online since before the Internet, often using my real name and displaying my email address and telephone number, and I haven't had a problem. If someone steals my identity, maybe they'll get the bills paid on time.
 
Last edited:
That reminds me of a conversation I had in the early 2000s with the Manager of Wells Fargo Bank in Eureka. He was trying to get me to sign up for "Bill Pay" (very original name, eh?) and I kept saying no. He asked me why. So I thought for a moment.

I asked him something like "Who do you think has a more secure network, your Bank or the US Government?"

"The US Government, of course," he said.

So I asked him "Why?"

"Because they have many more resources than the Bank does," he said.

"Do you know of any US Government websites that have been hacked?" I asked him.

"No."

"How about the White House, the IRS, the Social Security Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the CIA or the FBI? There are many more. So if they can't protect people from hackers with all of their computer experts, do you honestly think your Bank can?"

He said "Point taken."

That was very entertaining, to say the least. 😁
 
Did anyone read about the theft of medical ID in California? It appears they are stealing records of Medicare patients and signing them into hospices in California to collect hospice payments from Medicare in your name. Many of the people don't know it has been done until they go to get medical care and cannot because they are listed as dying in a hospice facility in California. Here is a Fox story on it. It apparently run by the Russian/Armenian mob and may end up dwarfing the Minneapolis stuff. Governor Newsom is aware of a problem and has pulled over 200 hospice licenses in the LA area, but he doesn't appear to be aware of the scale of the fraud.
 
That was just hitting on X yesterday in the new sources that I read there, but all I saw was that it was a Medicare scam and it was being done by the Russian Armenians and that it was a huge scam, the size of which has not yet begun to come out. I imagine we will be reading more about this scam happening in other places now that it is being brought to light.

Having the citizen journalists who are investigating these scams and putting it all on social media is a wonderful thing. People will read it on social media , even if they are not sure it is true.
Like the daycare fraud, most of that has not even come out on mainstream news channels, so the only way people know about it is when they have a social media account.

Facebook is so liberal that it is hard to get much truth on there, and having an account on X is the very best way to read what is truly happening in the world today.
It took me a while to get the hang of using X, but I just kept following accounts who were putting out real news, as well as our government accounts and conservative news accounts, and now I have a pretty good overview .
 
I received a Jan 9 letter from Med Atlantic Health, who provides services to various health providers (including my urologist.) They got hacked into in November...medical & personal data "could have been" taken. They said they worked with [past tense] medical providers to notify potentially impacted individuals. So I don't know if I'm "potentially impacted," or received the letter because I have a record in their databases. The letter says "Could have involved your data."
 
Don Alaska said:
Did anyone read about the theft of medical ID in California? It appears they are stealing records of Medicare patients and signing them into hospices in California to collect hospice payments from Medicare in your name. Many of the people don't know it has been done until they go to get medical care and cannot because they are listed as dying in a hospice facility in California.
Click to expand...
If that were to happen to me, and I did not go see a Doc in the following three months, I would see it in the records that get mailed out from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. (I hope I am not the only one who gets those that actually reads them.) But since I have to see my Doc every couple of months because one of my meds is a Schedule 1 drug (Lyrica aka, Pregabalin), I would probably find out then.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top