The last week has seen some major stories about identity theft and fraud. Since so many major things happened, I would like to point out a few of the major stories and give you some links so you can read more about them.

Perhaps the biggest news story was about Albert Gonzalez. On Monday, Gonzalez was charged with conspiracy, theft and fraud for allegedly stealing the personal data of 130 million people. Gonzalez could face five years in jail on conspiracy charges and another thirty years in jail for fraud. And top all that off with a fine of either $1.25 million or twice the amount of money he stole.

Do you run an eCommerce site? Would you like it to be included in the SmartSwipe database? If so, please comment on this thread and we will test your page and add the record in to our database. That way, when a SmartSwipe user visits your page, he/she can simply swipe, confirm his/her credit card details and complete the transaction.

It cannot get any easier than that...

There is a constant race being waged between cyber-criminals and security researchers and the spoils of this race are (or should be) of great importance to you. Cyber-criminal release a new strain of personal information stealing malicious software, researchers wait to receive a copy and then write a patch to fix it. And innocent people become victims in between the release and the patch.

Several days ago, PandaLabs released some research which shows just how adept cyber-criminals have become at winning this race. Turns out that 52% of malicious software only spreads and steals data for 24 hours before it becomes inactive and harmless. After 24 hours, this malicious software is replaced by new variants, which researchers have not yet had the opportunity to fix. The race continues...

This story has not been around for long and, as yet, there is not a huge amount of information available about it. However, I have been talking about Facebook quite a lot lately and felt that this was a good story to share with all of you. Three adults and two minors filed a civil suit against Facebook, claiming that the popular social networking site violates California privacy laws.

Based on information taken from the Insurance Journal and the Marketing Pilgrim, this lawsuit alleges that Facebook violates California privacy law by sharing personal information with third parties (without adequate consent) and that Facebook engages in data mining/harvesting without fully informing users.

I think that I am slipping - it is August 20 and I still have not updated this blog with Phonebuster's identity theft statistics from July 2009! July 2009 saw the continuation of a scary trend that I mentioned in last month's article - fewer victims are getting defrauded out of significantly more money.

In July 2009, 714 people reported being defrauded out of $982,748.15. This compares to June 2009, when 984 people reported being defrauded out of $828,029.53. So far in 2009, 7,841 people reported being defrauded out of $6,467,582.67! Considering that a very small percentage of identity theft victims report the crime to Phonebusters, these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. Identity theft costs are soaring and individuals are losing more money per theft than they did just a few months ago.

Last month, I wrote about a virus that may have stolen several thousand medical records from Alberta Health Services. Today, I stumbled across a very interested article by Infosecurity's Bureau Chief Danny Bradbury that I thought I should share with all of our readers.

The article, entitled, "Is Patient Data Privacy on its Sickbed?" takes a look at the plan to modernize the United States medical system. Bradbury poses some difficult questions about security, privacy and fair use of patient information.

About three weeks ago, I wrote an article about the Canadian Privacy Commissioner's findings against Facebook. I have some great news for you privacy fans out there - Facebook has announced that it is going to comply with the Privacy Commissioner's findings. In fact, it is going to file its plan by the end of today.

In case you don't remember, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada found four areas in which Facebook's policies were somewhat lacking. These areas include:

• Facebook give third party developers access to too much of your personal information.
• Facebook keeps information indefinitely in the event that you deactivate your account
• Facebook keeps deceased users' accounts active indefinitely as 'memorial accounts', though they do not have any information on this in their privacy policy.
• Facebook lets you add a non-user's personal information without that non-user's permission

In exciting news, SmartSwipe version 1.6.7 is now available for download off of our web site. It has been roughly three weeks since SmartSwipe version 1.6.6 was released. While this is not a major update, we encourage all of our new customers to use the latest version.

Other than a few usability enhancements, the big addition in SmartSwipe v1.6.7 is the addition of a registration form. So now, all of our customers can register their version of SmartSwipe. Though registration is not required, we encourage all of you to register and introduce yourselves.