Not so nice twice

We have had credit card fraud committed against us twice in the past couple months.  The first time was on Ali’s account that is used for her business.  Not only did they charge bogus items, they also changed the billing address on the card.  Now this past weekend we received an email from American Express about some possible shady charges, including $700 to Dell!  Ali called up and got it cleared up but regardless, it is quite disturbing.

I wonder how strongly the CC companies pursue these cases since they are so numerous?  I would have loved to pursue this person myself.  It wouldn’t be that hard to do, find out what address the Dell computer was going to and you have your criminal.  People that do this are absolute criminals and deserve every ounce of punishment the law allows. 

The next question is where are they getting the CC information from?  Ali and I both use our CC’s freely on the internet.  You never know if one of these vendors has been hacked and in the process exposed your info.  Hell CC info can be stolen by shady clerks, waiters or even skimmers.  I had one situation a year or two ago where a waiter casually padded the tip when he ran the CC, assuming I wouldn’t notice.  People are dirt bags.

I tried to roll out ISA server 2006 into production last night.  During my initial testing last night I was able to ping to and from our branch networks, connect to the internet and open network shares.  Stuff seemed to be working.  Well this morning there were fires everywhere.  People signing on to the network could not do so, it would just sit and spin.  I was unable to connect to our web host via ftp either despite having a rule in place that would clearly seem to allow such access.

I have found ISA server 2006 to be a royal pain in the ass to configure.  The rules which seem logical and simple to create just do not work as they should.  I am getting quite annoyed.