| OCR Text |
Show Volume I , Issue IX Page 1 June 1999 The Ogden Valley News Your Community Newspaper The June 1999 BULK RATE POSTAGE PAID PERMIT NO. 11 Ogden Valley News Avoiding Postal Fraud Inside This Issue: Woe Be to the Woad PAGE 3 Compiled by Shanna Francis A notice to P.O. Box customers in the Salt Lake City area from Postal Inspectors read: Property Tax Evaluation PAGE 4 Estate Planning PAGE 4 Safety for Children PAGE 5 Land Trusts PAGE 6 Townships PAGE 7 Thriving in the Hot Zone PAGE 8 Ogden Canyon News PAGE 13 Announcements PAGE 14 The Hearthside PAGE 15 Essay Winner PAGE 16 Classifieds PAGE 18 Forest Service Happenings PAGE 19 Recreation PAGE 20 Special Feature Article PAGE 22 Raptor Schedule PAGE 27 POSTAL PATRON EDEN - LIBERTY- 84310 HUNTSVILLE - 84317 OGDEN CANYON - 84401 HCR 843AO • Three Amigos Trevor Blanchard, Chelsea Hogge, and Karen Peterson prepare to leave Valley Elementary on the last day of school. Even though the students have a lot of great plans to keep them busy this summer, they are already looking forward to going back to school in the fall at Snowcrest Jr. High. Have Your Wires Been Crossed Lately? By Janet Hoffmann Are my wires crossed? Personally I would have to answer “yes,” I’ve always been a little bit on the goofy side. I can get wrong numbers, or even forget who I’m calling before the person on the other end of the line picks up the phone! But this time it wasn’t my personal wires that were crossed. This time I can blame it on technology. On June 1, the phone system had a hay day. Did you have people you didn’t know calling you? Did you dial the telephone number of a friend and get someone else? Did you call someone and then get disconnected, or find yourself eavesdropping on someone else’s phone conversation? When you tried to ask them how they got on your line you realized they couldn’t hear you and they just continued chatting. Another question, did your phone ring and, upon answering, find you were eavesdropping upon someone else’s phone call again? Someone called our home the other day. My daughter answered the phone and a boy asked, “Can you take me to piano lessons?” My daughter replied, “This is Megan.” The boy said, “Oops” and hung up. Later, when talking to that person who had dialed our number, we found that she had heard the same conversation and had hung up because she didn’t want to eavesdrop. With a large family like ours we have lots of visitors in our home. Thus, many came and shared some of the conversations they had heard from June 1st to the 4th. We’ve had a lot of fun talking and laughing about them. In sharing some of them, the names have been changed to protect the guilty. Were any of these your conversations? Two ninth grade boys, talking on the phone, were discussing what a bad deal it was that they were restricted from going to Lagoon with the school because of something they had done, while, at the same time, some eighth grade boys, who had committed the same offense, were being allowed to go on the excursion (we could let the school know what they otherwise, might not know—goodbye undercover cops). Two other teenage boys were talking about how they were planning on getting drunk (this could be a great way to prevent teenage drinking)! Two women were heard saying, “Well I told him that if he were going over there that they wouldn’t be too happy to see him—well, I’m just going to go put in my contacts and go to lunch.” One woman said, “George, I told you to go to Job Service.” The man answered, “They don’t have jobs like that now days, Marge.” “How’s Betsy?” a woman asked. “She seems to be doing better,” was the man’s reply. “Are you going to come do my plumbing?” another asked. A woman answered, “I’ll send someone right over.” A family with two separate lines in their home reported that a woman called and asked for Ralph. They responded that the woman had the wrong number. After hanging up, their other line started ringing. When they picked it up, Ralph was on the line. He thought that the party had called him! “On April 5, 1999, the trash from the box lobby of the Downtown Station had been taken. It was also reported that this has happened twice before. It is a possibility that whoever took the trash was trying to obtain financial and personal information. Please be aware, that unsolicited credit card applications, along with mail containing personal and/ or financial information, should never be deposited into any waste receptacle. This type of information can be used to defraud you or obtain fraudulent accounts in your name. . . A preventative measure you can take is to not throw any unwanted mail containing personal or financial information into any waste receptacle. We recommend that prior to disposing this type of mail, you shred or rip it up.” According to a Summer/Fall 1998 Law Enforcement Report, identity theft has become the fastest growing type of robbery. Crooks use your social security number, or blank pre-approved credit applications you toss out with the garbage. In recent years, millions of dollars have been lost to financial institutions because of this fraud. The article in the Law Enforcement Report explains: “Do you carry your social security number in your wallet? Consider this: that nine-digit code gives crooks access to your medical, financial, credit and educational records. There are no legal restrictions on private company use of social security numbers (SSNs); in fact, a data base of names with associated SSNs recently was found published on the internet. What’s worse, most states still use your SSN for your driver’s license number–a policy that is, fortunately, changing. If you think you’re safe after your wallet was stolen because you canceled your credit card and put a “stop” on your checking account, think again. Once identity thieves have the information, they may open new accounts or lines of credit–under your new name, for their use.” A man called a home and asked for Pat. When the party answering the phone told him that he had the wrong number, he asked, “Do you know Pat’s number?!!” During this very strange week full of very strange telephone happenings, people were getting messages from people they didn’t even know, and some people even reported picking up recorded conversations on their answering machines between people who were Another article in Kiplinger ’s Personal Finance Magazine cites that, in 1995, TRW, one of the three largest credit bureaus, was getting 600 to 700 new fraud cases every day, and those figures were on the rise. Some of those who perform the illegal activities are employees or patrons of mail rooms, airlines, hotels or personnel offices. Some crooks apply for and accept specific jobs in order to gain access to this personal financial information, or they may bribe others already established in these jobs to obtain the information for them. In many cases, these types of crimes are highly organized by large crime rings. CONTINUED on page 2 CONTINUED on page 3 |
