Word: credit-card
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...your credit-card information was stolen recently, there's a decent chance it fell into the hands of Albert Gonzalez. The infamous computer hacker was indicted along with two unnamed co-conspirators in a New Jersey court on Aug. 17 for the alleged theft of some 130 million card numbers. The crime is believed to be the largest retail-store theft in U.S. history. Although little is known about Gonzalez's personal life, he has a long history of hacking and has been known to operate on both sides of the law. (Read "A Brief History of Cybercrime...
...Arrested in New Jersey in 2003 while working as an administrator for the underground, 4,000-member website Shadowcrew.com, on which hackers swapped stolen credit-card information...
...have come for revenge. For years, I've hyperventilated at restaurant "tasting menu" checks, forfeited 1,000% markups for bottle service at clubs, neared my credit-card limit for hotel suites, paid usury to strip-club ATMs and pushed far too many chips to the dealer. On this trip, I will get a hotel room for less than the upkeep on the room, eat a meal for near what it costs to serve it and - at least according to a sign in the Cheetahs dressing room berating the strippers for undercharging - get some kind of deal in the VIP room...
...that return to normal is driven by a return to reasonable lending: people aren't buying more than they can afford to because banks won't let them. When the Robertses first met with mortgage planner Iva Deobald last year, she told them to go away, pay down their credit-card and student-loan debt and then come back with a better set of financials. Deobald says, "I'm back to what I used...
...South Dakota, for instance, loosened its laws in 1980], and once they did, the credit-card companies recognized a wonderful opportunity. They could charge as much as the market would bear, claiming that they had to charge more for bad credit risks. You can argue that's the democratization of credit, but it's in the interest of credit-card companies to keep people under the yoke. We've just swapped loan sharks for legitimate loan sharks. (See pictures of TIME's Wall Street covers...