WombatNation

Wired News: Credit Card Cos. Watch Own Backs

This story in Wired refers to a Gartner report.

The report notes that while credit card companies’ “zero-liability” policies protect card holders from paying for unauthorized or fraudulent charges, they do not protect consumers from identity theft and the credit report hell that can follow.

I can identify with that. The person who stole my identity and opened eight credit accounts didn’t even use my exact name. One of the companies actually issued him/her a card in the name “Stewart L. Bobby”, even though the credit reports I received from Experian, Trans-Union, and Equifax all correctly listed my name as “Robert A. Stewart”.

While I didn’t have to pay any of the roughly $15,000 the thief ran up on these accounts, I estimate that I have spent over 40 hours straightening things out, and I’m not done, yet. Last week I received the notice from the last of the eight that they had asked all three credit bureaus to delete the details of the acocunts from my credit record, but I still have to get the credit bureaus to update some additional data.

Not only did the credit agencies add the fake names, addresses, and phone numbers to my personal data, but also two of the bureaus have my birthdate off by over a week.

Data thieves nab 55,000 student records | CNET News.com

My sister-in-law, a UT Austin law school grad like my brother, let me know that the affected SSNs were in the following ranges:

449-31-98xx - 450-91-24xx
451-12-32xx - 451-20-35xx
451-20-64xx - 452-20-40xx 

Fortunately, mine isn’t in one of those ranges, as I used to work as a Research Scientist Associate at UT Austin:Applied Research Labs and I attended graduate school in computer engineering at UT, as well.

Last week’s East Bay Express has a well-written cover story by Katy St. Clair titled Has CMJ Become the Monster That Ate College Radio? My wife Sandra is the general manager of KALX, the radio station at UC Berkeley.

The music directors at KALX, like those at many other college radio stations, report their top 30 album playlist to CMJ, the College Music Journal. CMJ puts out a glossy magazine that includes the reported playlists, but only after they have verified them.

Therein lies the problem that KALX first exposed. Ian Hetzner, one of the co-music directors at KALX, happened to notice over the holidays that an album by local band Loretta Lynch had been replaced by the CMJ compilation Certain Damage in the KALX playlist in an issue of the CMJ New Music Report. Record labels pay CMJ up to $3,000 to have a song by one of their bands placed on one of the Certain Damage compilations, so CMJ has an obvious financial stake in seeing their compilation get charted.

It turns out that CMJ had an unpublished and unadvertised rule that when one of the 1,200 or so stations reporting to them listed an album not in the CMJ database, they simply replaced it with their own compilation. KALX had pretty good proof of this when they discovered one of their older playlists in CMJ had Certain Damage charting at two spots in their top thirty! After Ian posted this news to the KALX mailing list, many people at other college stations reported that CMJ had done this to them as well.

Regardless of the company’s intent, its actions have rocked the college radio world. “The thing that strikes me about this,” says KALX general manager Sandra Wasson, “is I can’t imagine that Billboard or R&R would do something like this. If they did, it would be seen as a really big problem.”

There are lots more details in the rather long and detailed story, so check it out if you’re interested in college radio intrigue.