Netspend sends out card that I didn’t order :

netspendsite

I arrived home today with Netspend card in my Mailbox. The letter states that I ordered the card and it has arrived. So I am concerned because of the possible [intlink id=”2644″ type=”post”]Identity theft[/intlink] that could be going on so I call them to find out what the heck is going on.   I call to find out it who signed me up for this and to get some kind of information as to the people who had this information about me.   I ask for the financial service that “recommended me for this Card” because I want to make a phone call to them about the security concerns  about sharing my personal information.   I say that because they had my Name, my mailing address.  This isn’t totally hard to find had I had a Land phone but with me just having a cell phone.

[ad]I ask for the IP of the person who signed me up and they said they don’t have that information and they have no information on who did it.  This sounds  like a poor way  to offer pre-paid card that has a VISA logo.   I think this is poor security and if someone signs me up and uses my identity what ever happened to logs?    This is what is most concerning to me, because I would have expected if someone signs up they would at least keep the IP in case of some criminal activity to know if it was one IP that is making so many creation of cards.   This is a fundamental principle in financial institutions that hold our money.

I did a Google search for others who had this happened and I see a bunch of people complaining about the same thing.  Some of the more important topics were, Netspend Is A Fraud! and Unethical Pirates! I found some really concerning complaints from people around the US.  All these are concerning, I told them to close out the account and I will be watching my credit for the next 6 months.   I think this was unethical by both Netspend and the Financial service, due to the fact that I didn’t give the financial services permission to give out my information.   I don’t know if Netspend had my SSN but I didn’t activate the card so I don’t know but I am very concerned by the way Netspend did not keep logs on who and when something like this was done.   If I find out what financial service did this I will be contacting the FTC and BBB over this.   I want to hear if anyone else has had this happened?  I will advise everyone who has this happened to call immediately to close out the account and complain to appropriate people.  

Crafty little Trojan:W32/DNSChanger.ARNF

Saw this post and couldn’t resist talking about it.   This was talked about on F-secure.    It looks like they use a program call “Homeview Installer” and after you install it you get the Trojan:W32/DNSChanger.ARNF.   So how do you get that off your system?  Before we talk about that, let’s talk about what it does.  According to F-secure:

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This malware is dropped onto the system by Trojan-Dropper:W32/Agent.FLN. It is used to change the DNS settings on a system so that information such as passwords and credit card details can be retrieved.

[Via F-secure]

What you need to do to get rid of this of this Trojan is to scan your system.   You will also need to understand that this is a really good Trojan, it sees to modify your DNS and also your Registry.   Once you located and destroyed it you will then want to remove all your restore points.  After that you will want to check my other resources to better protect yourself.   You are the only one to prevent a virus from getting on your system.   If you like this one check out my other post as well.

Cricket USB UM100 Broadband Wireless Modem Review.

The UM100c is No Longer Available, Please check out the Cricket [intlink id=”3059″ type=”post”]A600 Modem Review[/intlink] Or the [intlink id=”4523″ type=”post”]UM185 Broadband modem[/intlink]. The UM185 modem might be a replacement to the UM100.

After a full week of playing around with this USB wireless, I wanted to talk about it. So let’s break it down into pieces.

  1. [ad#text-broadband1]
  2. Installation —  The installation of the USB was not to difficult.  I did have to do some more steps than this:  Install the Software, then hooked up the USB device to the USB port.
  3. Manual Activated the Broadband —  For some reason in my area they had several people have problems with the broadband activation.  So I had to activate it manually!!

After that all went well, I was on the internet just a cruising along.  I did however wonder why I was getting such a slow response speed.  When I went traveling I thought I would share some of my local results with you to better show you my speed.  All these test were done at

my speed test around town

Please see an updated post on how to get even more speed from the broad band modem.
This speed is not the true speed for the broad band modem
.

The Percentages over the results are showing you just what my signal strength was when I was doing the test.  Two of the 4 were traveling on the highway and the other two were stationary.  I also know that my speed will vary along with signal strength, I know I have to be a mile or less from a tower to get 100%.

*Update* 12/21/08

[ad#cricket-1]In my other post I talk about why I didn’t get the speed I expected, but after I did the activation I went to normal Mobile Broadband speeds.   I also now have been using the USB Modem for my main internet without any or much problems.   I know I can’t play any major online games but I can at least have the internet with me were ever  I go.   As long as you stay in the coverage area, you should be in good shape.  .  Like I Said I’ve used it in my area for over a 1 month and with the small little problem, the speed has been really dependable and I haven’t had any major issue with connectivity. I’ve been using this modem as my main internet and have not seen any major internet and have not seen any of the cap come my way.   I think they won’t mind to much as long as you don’t ABUSE the internet, for example don’t use it for bittorrent downloads and you should be fine!!

Update 12/24/2008
I also did travel with my laptop to another city, and I got to say it was really good and how it did when I went from one city to another. Check out the report here.
According to some post and forum talks around the the internet they are talking about the soft cap of 5 Gigabytes but that seems to not be so important right now.   After all, they have to make money some how.   I will update as necessary when I find anything else out.

update 1/01/09

I also did a video and uploaded it to youtube using the broadband connection. I had no problem uploading this video to Youtube. I’ve embedded it in this web page. See it on the bottom:

I also bought the [intlink id=”3059″ type=”post”]A600 Cricket modem[/intlink] and I absolutely love this modem because of the things you can do with it.