Archive for category crime

Expert Cat Burglars in Best Buy Heist

Wow. This is the stuff that movies and books are made of. Long ago, cat burglars would steal diamonds, emeralds, tiaras, and cash. What are thieves grabbing today?

Apple Macbooks.

*chuckle*

SOUTH BRUNSWICK — They never touched the floor — that would have set off an alarm.

They didn’t appear on store security cameras. They cut a hole in the roof and came in at a spot where the cameras were obscured by advertising banners.

And they left with some $26,000 in laptop computers, departing the same way they came in — down a 3-inch gas pipe that runs from the roof to the ground outside the store.

Police believe that’s how some brazen bandits managed to swipe 20 Apple notebooks early this morning at a Best Buy on Route 1 in South Brunswick without detection.

“High level of sophistication,” said Detective James Ryan, a police department spokesman. “They never set off any motion sensors. They never touched the floor. They rappelled in and rappelled out.”

Employees discovered the missing laptops, as well as a gaping hole in the ceiling, when they arrived to work around 6:30 this morning.

The thieves left boot prints on the gas pipe, which runs up the side of the building in Monmouth Junction, Ryan said.

On top of the building, they used a saw to cut through several inches of rubber and insulation, then sliced a 3-foot-wide square in the metal roof, he said.

Once inside, the burglars dropped 16 feet to 10-foot-tall racks — avoiding contact with the floor, where motion sensors would have set off an alarm. They snatched the notebooks from the racks, then went back out through the roof.

You can read the rest of the story here.

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Twitter Spam Scam Hits Users

If you use Twitter, be on the lookout for (another) phishing scam. It comes in the guise of a genuine follower’s message– usually it’s a direct message but there have been reports of the message on the public Twitter roster– saying something like “LOL, is this u?” or “hahaha u look funny here.”

If you click the link in the email, your browser will redirect you to the phishing site that looks just like Twitter. If you enter your username and password, you’ve just handed your credentials over to a spammer. The spammer will use your Twitter account to send messages to all your followers about pharmaceutical drugs; moreover, your account will be used as a springboard for more of those “hahaha u look funny here” messages to infect more Twitter user accounts.

So if you receive such an email, don’t click the link, don’t enter your username and password! If you think you have been snagged by the scam, change your password immediately. You can also read more about the scam at Mashable.

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Clark Howard: Major Retailers Ripping You Off

I got the following in my email from Clark Howard e-zine:

RIP-OFF ALERT: We’ve gotten several calls from listeners complaining about being ripped off while checking out at many otherwise legitimate Internet selling sites.

Typically, our callers report seeing a message during checkout asking if they’d like to save X amount of dollars on their purchase. Clicking through on the message and agreeing secretly enrolls you in a subscription service that is billed to your credit card or debit account on a monthly basis. And there’s no real notification — other than some mice-type that’s too small to read.

The Wall Street Journal reports New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo suspects 22 companies of being involved with this rip-off. Among the companies he’s subpoenaed are Staples, Barnes &Noble, Avon, GameStop, 1-800-Flowers and Orbitz, just to name a few.

No need, however, to wait and hear their side of the story. You know all you need: That supposed instant discount will cost you big-time. Cuomo alleges that three of these discount programs pulled in more than $1 billion annually.

The real question is how will trusted brands that take advantage of this suspect sales ploy gain their reputations back with customers??

You can read the full post here. The comments are really, really enlightening, I think. I had no idea that such reputable companies would do such STUPID things!

When checking out [at CVS], there is a ‘donate $1′ to some so called charity which is very difficult to say no and get this off my bill. If cvs wants to donate, don’t scam me and everyone else for all these dollars that add up to millions. It is quite a scam and has to be illegal. It is very difficult to remove this.

As you check out of VisionDirect, there is a checkbox already checked for coolsavings.com. i did not notice it and began getting charged a monthly fee immediately. I caught it five months later and contacted coolsavngs.com. They reimbursed me all except one month worth – I would have had to fill out some form. Just wanted to be done with the company. Complained to VisionDirect about this and to date no response. Will take my business to a competitor from now on, even if they charge a few dollars more.

In my case, the charges started to hit twice a month for around $33 (each) when I purchased an airline ticket from Travelocity.

I’ve been a victim of this for the past 7 months from freeshipping.com without knowing about it. My wife purchased flowers from Proflowers.com and was enrolled in this service, they make it seem like part of the checkout process so you have no idea what you are signing up for.

For a few pennies per customer, companies are ripping people off by allowing third-parties to scam customers. It’s just insane. Watch the fine print!

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Login to Your Computer With Face-Scanning Software

This blows my mind: what was once high-tech security measures comes to a computer near you. C|Net.com wrote a riveting article about the latest program to come down the pike: KeyLemon. It uses the webcam to detect your face and upper-body shape. There’s even a Firefox plugin for logging in to social networking sites.

KeyLemon adds an extra layer of security to your computer log-in process by making your Webcam do all the heavy lifting. Instead of typing your password, KeyLemon 2.2 associates your face with your profile, and then regularly checks to make sure that the person sitting in front of the computer matches the image attached to that profile. If it doesn’t think they match, the computer takes a photo via the Webcam and then automatically goes to hibernate.

The latest version of KeyLemon introduces a Firefox plug-in called LemonFox that lets users log in to three social-networking services using their Webcam.

C|Net said that the software was pretty good, working correctly about 90% of the time.

I don’t know about you… this stuff may be convenient, but if it doesn’t work, I’d probably wind up throwing my computer across the room!

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DIY Motion Detector Security

I just love the site Lifehacker. Some of the best ideas are here! This latest one, Motion Detection Is an Effective, Dead Simple Security Camera App is a great tip for making some quick and easy (and of course, like any DIY project, limited) security camera action. I’ve looked into security cameras before, but dismissed them after seeing the sky-high prices of the equipment.

There’s a small software program, called Motion Detection, that you install on your computer. (You need a webcam in order to use Motion Detection). It will turn the webcam on when it detects motion. You can set the sensitivity with a slider. Very neat! I will HAVE to try this!

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