Simple tips for avoiding identity theft as collected over time.

1. PIN or password protect your credit cards and bank accounts whenever possible.  don’t use your address phone number or brithdate as passwords as these are easy to guess.  Never store your PIN with your card (Personal Identification Number)

2. Do not carry your SIN (social security) card in your wallet or purse.  Keep it in a safe place in your home or safety deposit box.

3. Review your bank and credit card statements eac moth for accuracy, and report any discrepancies quickly.

4. Secure your computer with a firewall.  Use up to date virus protection software and malware protection software.

5. Never disclose credit card information or financial details over the phone or Internet to a caller (they initiate the call).  Ask for their phone number, and name and then look up the phone number from a reputable resource (the phone book) and ask to speak to the person who called.  This assures you they aren’t lying about where they are calling from.

6. Never enter personal or credit card information including passwords and usernames for financial matters on an unsecured website.  The URL should start with HTTPS:// and a locked padlock icon should appear if you are on a secured site.

7. Never enter credit card or financial information on a website without assessing who it is (even if the webpage is secured).  Look at the URL carefully.  Is the company you are dealing with well known?  Is there an option for paying without disclosing your information (PayPal for example holds your financial information, but allows you to make payments to third parties).

8. Be aware of the scam named Phishing.  This is where you receive an email claiming to be from a bank or other financial company, there will be a link to a fake website that looks like the bank and they will request that you enter in a user name and password (which they record and use later to access your “real bank account”. Report phishing immediately to the bank being impersonated.

9. In Canada report scam letters and phishing attempts tohttp://www.phonebusters.org

10. Occasionally request your credit report from the credit bureaus Equifax or Transunion to determine if fraudulent accounts have been opened in your name.

11. If you suspect your information has been stolen, act quickly to prevent identity theft by contacting your banks and credit card companies.   Keep a record of any conversations and correspondence with creditors and contact the credit bureaus mentioned above to advise them of your situation.

I originally wrote this compilation of tips for my customers at GreenTree I hope you find some of them helpful.   Unsolicited messages, commonly called “spam,” comprise approximately 50 percent of all e-mail carried on the Internet, according to industry estimates. Respectable businesses will remove your e-mail address from their mailing list if you ask. However, many spammers want to push their offers into as many e-mail boxes as possible and will take any response-even if it’s “REMOVE ME FROM YOUR LIST!”-as encouragement to keep sending out new messages.

Currently, there is no way to ensure a 100 percent spam-free e-mail box. You can make it more difficult for spammers to get your e-mail address, however. There are also steps you can take when unwanted e-mail does arrive in your mailbox. Plus you can ask your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and other organizations to help you identify a spam mail’s origins. You can use that information to try to block future mailings from known spammers.    View an updated version of this list HERE:

Here are some tips to help prevent spam from filling your e-mail box:

Avoid posting your e-mail address in public. Many spammers buy e-mail address lists from brokers who compile their lists by harvesting addresses from Internet newsgroup postings, Web sites, chat rooms, membership directories for online services, and other sources.

Alter your e-mail address before posting it publicly. List brokers do their harvesting with computer programs that scan Web pages and newsgroups in search of e-mail addresses. You might be able to foil these harvesting programs by altering your posted e-mail address in an obvious way, such as changing joesmith@mail.com to joeH8SJUNKMAILsmith@mail.com. Most humans will know to remove H8SJUNKMAIL from the address before they use it, but computer programs will not.

Never respond to a spam e-mail, even to unsubscribe. The e-mail message may include instructions on how to remove your address from the organization’s list, such as telling you to reply with REMOVE in the subject line or to call a phone number. However, many spammers do this only to try to confirm that they have reached a real person’s e-mail account. Unless you are unsubscribing from a distribution list that you signed up for or you know the sender of the message, it is safer to discard the message without responding

Create an alternate e-mail address to use on the Internet. Your primary e-mail address should only be given to friends, family, business contacts, and other people whom you know. Consider setting up a second e-mail address to use when filling out information requests, applications for special offers, and other forms on the Web.

Apply for a free Yahoo or Hotmail account to use as a “spam sink”.  Gmail (www.gmail.com) does a very good job of filtering spam with perhaps 1 in 100 spams showing up in your inbox.

Set up filters to block known spammers’ messages. Many e-mail programs offer a “filter” option that you can use to automatically send junk and adult-content mail to a specified folder-or the trash. Many programs will allow you to filter on e-mail names as well. To ensure you do not accidentally throw away mail from friends and family, consider creating a “junk mail” folder for your filtered messages. Be sure to check the folder before you empty it.

Use junk e-mail filters in your email program

Consider reporting spammers to ISPs, e-mail providers, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Most Internet Service Providers (ISP) and account providers have a complaint address for e-mail issues. If you get unwanted mail, look at the return address. The ISP name should be in the middle (between the “@” sign and the designator, e.g., “.com”). Forward a copy of the spam mail to the ISP’s complaint address. Most providers will take steps to eliminate spammers from their system. In addition, send a copy of any deceptive or unwanted mail to the FTC at uce@ftc.gov. The FTC uses its database of unsolicited messages to pursue law-enforcement actions against senders of spam. (The FTC only can take action against spammers based in the U.S.)

Review all user agreements. When signing up for Web-based services such as online banking, shopping, or online newsletters, you should carefully review the corresponding user agreements to assure yourself that your e-mail address will not be shared with other organizations.

Don’t participate in email chain letters or pyramind schemes. Bill Gates is not going to pay you for sending junk email to your friends and family, neither is the Gap going to give you free clothes. Interenet “snowball fights” and other forms of chain emails are unwelcome on the net, and irritate most people who receive them. The same can be said for the “guilt letter” where you are required to pass on an email or you are a terrible person for caring so little about the mentioned issue.

Use the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field in your email program if you have to send an email to several people. This prevents everyone’s email address from being listed in the “to” field where all the recipients can see it. This becomes critical when the email is likely to be “forwarded on” as in the case of a joke or other ‘interesting’ email. While you know the people you are emailing, they don’t all know each other, or want the others to necessarily see their email address.

Don’t forward emails to others without first “cleaning” the email up by removing the previous sender’s and recipient’s email addresses. This prevents their address from being distributed beyond the people they know. Consider the user of a spam filtering software like “spambayes” or “mailwasher” to handle spam before it gets to your inbox.

pam appears to be here to stay, at least for now. Taking these steps can help you reduce your exposure to this online nuisance, however. If you have more spam fighting strategies, I’d love to hear your ideas! Send me a message with your idea    Know somebody who would benefit from some of the email “best practices” on this page? Send them the address (this link will open your mail program) and ask them to check it out.

Now I’m only interested in addressing change that moves us from an undesirable state to a better state. And I’m only interested in addressing change that is intentional, requiring the will of people to accept it and successfully make a change. There is this principle at work, that people tend to look to a perfect state, and if they can’t achieve that perfect state, then they won’t even attempt to improve things at all.

I’ll apologize, this article has been delayed because I’ve been bogged down with examples and keep missing the essence of what I’m trying to capture for you. I see the process like a bell curve. At first we are blithely continuing on doing something harmful. Then there is information introduced that leads us to believe that what we are doing may not be all good and perfect. We resist the idea, we like the status quo, some early adopters start shifting away from harmful activity. Following this there is a less harmful activity offered, and it becomes more popular/accessible to do things the new way, but the new way is still causing harm. Eventually the information, the education and the innovation continue, and people are moved from doing lots of harm, to doing less harm, to doing no harm, to actually reversing the process and undoing harm (repairing cumulative damage from prior activity).

We saw this with the hole in the ozone layer. We were using CFCs and other chemicals that actually caused a depletion of high altitude ozone, which showed up most obviously at the South Pole. Through education about what was going on, we as a global community were able to see harm, see the cause of the harm, make changes to reduce the harm, eliminate the harm and even remedy the harm.

Or take smoking. 50 years ago in North America it was passed off as “sophisticated”, healthy, normal, fashionable, and social. Education about the effects of smoking has been difficult to absorb. People didn’t want to give up their sophistication, their habit, the social aspects of smoking, or their FREEDOM!!! Please someone get me a flag. Even the cigarette companies started “reducing harm” they added filters, bigger filters, reduced tar etc in an attempt to make their products less harmful or decrease the perception of their harm. (How could breathing a carcinogen be bad for me? I breathed it through a paper filter.) Now we have people quitting, and their lungs by wonderful design are actually recovering with the risk of nasty diseases cut by as much as half 1 year after quitting. (We aren’t out of the woods with smoking yet are we?)

Education, publication, and dissemination of information come first. These make qualitative judgements on our actions “smoking may cause cancer” -> “smoking causes cancer” -> “Second hand smoke hurts your children you horrible person”. Now Judgement is a loaded word so lets use the relatively neutral word “evaluation”. An evaluation of a course of action is that it is not beneficial. This is judgement or discernment, or discrimination in the classic sense, but in our North American culture where discriminating shoppers sound horrible and where judging someone’s actions sounds intolerant, we are better off with retaining the idea of evaluating something sans baggage. Nobody likes to have their actions evaluated, and find that the evaluation requires them to change how they are living. But Education and evaluation create an opportunity for change. They show us the door, walking through it is up to us. This education and evaluation is not enough to continue on this pattern of change for the better. There needs to be will as well.

By this point in your life, you are familiar with the resistance of people to change how they do things. Big industry didn’t develop a conscience, they were forced to pollute less by legislation. Very few smokers successfully quit the first time they hear about health risks. There are always explanations for why we don’t change including. It can’t be done, it is hard, it is costly, it is inconvenient, it would hurt the economy, the alternatives aren’t much better, I was born this way, this is my right, and I don’t want to.

Will is essential in making a change. Without will the opportunity to change is merely academic. An interesting theory to be tossed around at the dinner table and then forgotten. The will to improve must stand strong in the face of an entrenched status quo, and in the face of active resistance and even counter-information.

e.g. “The link between human activity and global warming has not been proven” says the senator from the United States who received the majority of his campaign contributions from oil companies… 

Where there is a will, there is a way.  This way can be made easier through innovation (legislation, technology breakthroughs, new mindsets).

Now wanting to do no harm, or receive no harm is worthy, but it takes something more to pull people beyond the point where they stop hurting themselves or their children.  There needs to be a real self-lessness, or a real love that takes place in order to move into the healing phase.  The accountants won’t push us there because they are terrified of the costs of doing more than is required.  The lawyers were satisfied the moment we stopped harming, and are terrified that our attempts to heal could go wrong and cost us dearly. Its the lovers who need to lead this charge.  The idealistic dreamers turned world changers who move beyond “hurting others less” to “not hurting others” to “healing others”.

Lets test out this pattern with a real life example that is bound to have some people plugging their ears and singing “lalala I can’t hear you”.

Our cars consume gasoline that is refined from non-renewable fossil fuels. They produce exhaust that is deadly poison. (If you were to fill a room with exhaust and breath it for a short period of time you would die.) It is a scientific fact that there are a finite number of years of fossil fuels left on earth (http://www.energybulletin.net/659.html), and only a fraction of those fuels can be extracted at reasonable expense. So essentially by driving a gasoline powered car, I’m ensuring that humans consume what little fossil fuels the earth has left. Now the ideal state would be that my vehicle is powered by something plentiful (water) and produces no pollution (clean air). Then I could drive my car with impunity knowing I’m doing no harm (in terms of fuel consumption and air pollution). However, GM, Toyota, Honda, Ford, Chrysler, Mazda and others have not started selling cars that don’t consume fossil fuels or pollute the air. So today at reasonable cost I can’t have the perfect car.

My desire to leap to “perfect” is what makes this change impossible. Were I willing to purchase a car that gets gas mileage / kilometerage? that was twice as good, I could effectively cut my pollution in half, and effectively cut in half my consumption of fossil fuels. Were I able to commute to work with 2 other people, I would effectively cut the pollution from my driving by 2/3 for the days we carpooled. Were I to do both, I could cut my pollution to 1/6 of previous levels. That is a hugely significant change.

Sometimes what blinds us to the possibility of improvement is our insistence on having our cake and eating it too. People think of the 2 weeks a year they spend on summer vacation and insist on purchasing an SUV with lots of “cargo capacity”, which they proceed to drive to work the other 50 weeks a year. (effectively a big empty metal balloon). There is an un-willingness to “sacrifice” (drive an efficient subcompact car), so the improvement in gas mileage becomes negative. I don’t want to carpool with people as that would put constraints on my “lifestyle”, versus I can carpool 1 day per week.  We tell ourselves stories, that are eerily similar to the stories the marketeers tell us, to justify our reluctance to improve and change.

I see incremental change as the best hope of reaching an ideal state. It is slower in terms of total change, but it is easier in terms of disruption, it is easier in terms of economics (consumer and producer).  It is easier in terms of social change and behavioural improvement.  It is far easier to plan a trip to the neighbours than it is to plan a trip to Grandma’s house, but if the neighbour’s house is on the way to Grandma’s house, then the journey in the right direction has already begun.

Do you see places where this pattern of better versus perfect emerges?

AIDS is in the news because of the international Aids conference.