Kudos to Google for supporting Japan throug it’s search page and Crisis Response page – http://bit.ly/hUbaAL
I’m posting these details for the greater good. This should be indexed on Google within 24 hours.
My mother just got an offer from RCI Financial Title. They said they have a ‘corporate buyer’ for her three timeshares. The e-mail contained a poorly formatted, pseudo-contract offering $50,000 for her timeshare. They request a “Doc stamp fee” of $3500.
The kicker is, the properties are only worth $15,000 and this is “too good to be true”.
NOTE – RCI Financial Title is NOT associated with RCI (rci.com), the timeshare exchange company. My mother called to confirm.
Details about the scam:
E-mail came from a Hotmail address – phillharrisrcifinancialtitle@hotmail.com
Address used in the document (below) appears to be a UPS box (I love Google Maps!). There is no company with the name “RCI Financial Title” that shows up at the address in the e-mail. I did some research and have the real company address below (based on 2010 business tax records).
It’s also odd that the name in the document (Jack Phillips) is different from the e-mail address (Phillip Harris) doesn’t match the name within the e-mail (Jack Phillips).
Financial/Title Office: 8815 Conroy-Windermere Rd. Suite 113, Orlando, Fl 32835 (407)243-7512 Jack Phillips
The company web site (www.rcifinancialtitle.com) is a cheesy, basic web site. There is no e-mail associated with the domain, and the phone number for the company doesn’t match the phone number in the e-mail.
http://www.octaxcol.com/Download/LocalBusinessTaxData2010/lbtnbl20101002-08.pdf
RCI FINANCIAL TITLE
RCIJB WORLDWIDE ENTERPRISE LLC 10/04/2010
5934 BALBOA DR
ORLANDO FL 32808
ADVERTISING
407-879-7687
The company was incorporated June 2010, and the only ‘real’ name I found associated with the company is LISA GRANSKIE
Watching old Top Gear shows. Favorite episode includes Rick Wakeman (playing keyboard and driving). Added driving an NSX to bucket list.
Started on indoor trainer. Need to replace chains and tune up all the bikes. Fitness goal of AHA fit heart standards (<200 lbs) by August.
Twidroyd updated! I’m back online with Twidroyd. I missed you, old friend. Maybe this feud is over and everyone will play nice.
RT @timbray: Now, there’s a hashtag I can get behind: #BringBackTwidroyd // Twidroyd still not working, I’m now using TweetDeck on my Droid.
When you bump into people at a funeral discussing e-mail security problems, you know it’s a mainstream issue. A woman we were chatting with just spent the better part of two weeks restoring access to her MSN account after she received a variation of the “Mugged in London” scam. The result was someone hijacked her account and she had to work through MSN to restore access.
Just like Facebook’s support for SSL, using two factor security for Google is something everyone needs to implement.
The process is detailed on The Official Google Blog – Advanced sign-in security for your Google account.
The process is called 2-step verification – this allows you to link your account to your mobile phone, a Mobile application (Google Authenticator on the Android), and printable backup codes that you can keep in your wallet. In addition, you can have application-specific passwords to supposed access on your smartphone.
If you’re running Google Apps on your smartphone, I recommend doing this all at once – it will eliminate password prompts and confusion later.
The process also provides a summary of Connected Sites, Apps, and Services that have access to your Google Account. In my case, this includes paulbegley.com access to Blogger, pulsememe.com (Google Reader), google.com (Google Calendar), and tweetdeck (Google Buzz). I had forgotten about setting up Pulse access to my RSS feeds on Google Reader, but it was a good reminder.
You can revoke or renew access at any time using the 2-step verification process.
UPDATE: Note that once you enable advanced sign-in security, you may need to generate a new password for third party applications. I ran into this with Feeddemon, but it was a simple fix:
Why is Twitter blocking the best Android twitter client? – RT @twidroyd CEO @Bill_Gross explains what happened: http://b.qr.ae/ha2Brc
My BMI is high, which is my goal for 2011 – where are you? Only 1 in 1900 meet AHA’s definition of ideal heart health: http://bit.ly/e8LB2V
Just got off the phone with my accountant. Our taxes will be filed early for the first time in my adult life. I feel very relaxed right now.
