Data risk from photocopiers

Few people will be aware that photocopiers do not contain any data erasing capacity, which would protect their personal details. i.e. Almost every photocopier used at this point, and used in the past had a hard disk drive which stored the images copied over its life. When a photocopier is sold or returned to a leasing company, any data stored on it can be used by criminal interests. Little effort is being made to erase the HDD or remove and destroy it before these machines are sold. In fact they end up being sold to the third world, where important private details can be misused. Consider the following:

1. Use of personal HIV medical records to extort money

2. Use of bank account, social security numbers, passport to commit identity fraud

3. Use of your passport to make fraudulent passports.

4. Use of credit card details to make unauthorised payments

See the story here.

Internet Scam - Notice of disputing domain name in China

This is a consumer or business alert. I have recently been contacted by a Chinese/HK company suggesting that it has a client who is seeking to register a variety of similar domain names to your own. In our case, it was suggesting that a company called 'Hamston Trading' wanted to register our trading name. Of course there is always the possibility that other companies might want to secure our name, but I don't it. In any respect since we control the name .com extension, we might even pick up some extra business if this scam was real. The reality is - its just a scam. That is not to suggest they are doing anything illegal. I don't know, but there may in fact be a company of that name associated with them. But I doubt the Chinese domain registry would be engaging in such practices. Perhaps parties associated with them. Anyway, if you receive a letter framed like this, its a scam.

Dear CEO,

We are the department of registration service in China. we have something need to confirm with you. We formally received an application on March 24, 2009, One company which self-styled "Hamston Trading Inc" are applying to register "sheldonthinks" as internet brand and CN domain names as below :

sheldonthinks.asia
sheldonthinks.cn
sheldonthinks.com.cn
sheldonthinks.com.hk
sheldonthinks.com.tw
sheldonthinks.hk
sheldonthinks.in
sheldonthinks.net.cn
sheldonthinks.org.cn
sheldonthinks.tw
After our initial examination, we found that the internet brand applied for registration are as same as your company's name and trademark. These days we are dealing with it, hope to get the affirmation from your company. If your company and this"Hamston Trading Inc" as the same company,there is no need reply to us,We will accept their application and will register those for them immediately.
If your company has no relationships with that company nor do not authorized,please reply to us within 7 workdays,if we can't get any information from yours over 7 workdays,we will unconditionally approve the application submitted by "Hamston Trading Inc".

Best Regards,

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This is I must say an effective scam because the parties concerned are able to obtain your address details from the internet. Everyone who owns a domain name has a registered email and physical address. They use this to contact you. As is typical with such scams, they say the matter is urgent so you don't give it much thought.