Hackers Indicted After Hacking Subway Restaurant and Other Retailers POS Systems for Credit Card Data

Recently, the District of New Hampshire has charged four Romanians for numerous counts of fraud after tracking them to a connection of numerous retailers, including Subway restaurants, where hacked systems were used to obtain credit card information for fraudulent activities. This chain of individuals worked together to cause millions of dollars in unauthorized purchases.

The hackers allegedly accessed 150 Subway restaurants from 2008 to 2011, obtaining credit card information as well as PIN numbers to access accounts. They apparently set up accounts through GoDaddy and other services in order to store the data on FTP sites, then used the information to make fraudulent purchases.

This kind of activity happens more often than you’d think. This is why it is so important to have credit monitoring services to keep a close eye on your financial accounts and ensure that your good name stays strong, regardless of what happens to your credit due to identity theft and fraud.

When the Identity Thief is Your EX

When you break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend and it doesn’t go well, it’s normal to tear up their picture or burn letters they sent you. But some people take their breakups too far – resulting in online identity theft. While no financial information is being misused in this case, the damage done can be great. Dana Thornton of New Jersey was recently prosecuted for maintaining a fake Facebook page using her ex’s name and photographs. The goal was to make it look like he was a drug user and all around scummy guy. Not great for his reputation since he is a narcotics detective. She is currently facing charges of fourth degree identity theft.

This case brings to light the fact that you can never be sure who you are really interacting with on a social networking site. While some surely knew that the profile was fake, others must have believed that “he” was who he said he was. Of course, an ex-girlfriend would know a lot about his habits and have some of his personal information.
The best way to determine that someone you “friend” is who they say they are is to either find the page by searching for an email address for them that you know to be legitimate or to ask the person to ad you instead of the other way around. A friend of mine with a common name sometimes gets three requests a day from people he doesn’t know because they don’t bother to find out if they are requesting the right person. This is dangerous.

Crimes done on Facebook and like sites are difficult to prosecute, especially since only the states of California and New York currently have laws on the books preventing someone from impersonating someone else over the Internet. The main reason they even have them is because so many celebrities live in these two states, and people love to try to impersonate them.

Lawmakers are trying to amend New Jersey’s identity theft law to make it easier to prosecute such a crime, but they are running into trouble because crimes such as this are still fairly rare and they lack a legal precedent. However, if it works out, other states will likely follow suit in the near future.

In the meantime, make sure your security settings on your social networking profiles are tight, and perhaps look your name up every once in a while to see if there are any other “yous” out there that they’re shouldn’t be. Don’t be friends with anyone that you don’t trust – and certainly not anyone that you don’t know.

Other than that, some identity theft protection services help you monitor you social pages and may be worth looking into for that purpose but perhaps reputation management services would be better suited if there is no financial risk… but only you could determine that.

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