Paying petrol bill with your card? Watch out

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DELHI: Hackers around the world are getting innovative. From skimimng and cloning your credit card, to making fake sites; from using stolen cards on them to using new online trading models, the cyber thieves are working overtime to hack into your bank account. If you think that giving your credit or debit card to a petrol pump attendant or a restaurant waiter is safe, think again. Chances are that it would be ‘skimmed’ and ‘cloned’ into multiple cards by the time you reach home, warn security experts. Card thieves are using magnetic stripe readers and encoders which are easily available in the market for $250-$600. While a card reader can read the data on the magnetic band of your credit or debit card, an encoder can encode it on to any plastic card with a magnetic band, even a normal hotel room key. Also Read à SBI credit cards business reports Rs 150-crore loss à More Indians preferring to defer credit card payments à Is penny spent on your credit card penny earned? à Indians get elastic with plastic money Says network security management company Appin’s founder director, Rajat Khare, “All credit cards can be cloned by simply inscribing cards with a similar magnetic band just like a hotel number is fed into a magnetic room key. These kind of card frauds are becoming common.” Banks are advising customers to subscribe to mobile alerts. ICICI Bank card products head Sachin Khandelwal said, “We have a 45% market share with about 8.5 million credit cards in the market. The percentage of card frauds is low at about 4 basis points of all transactions. Nevertheless, we shoot an SMS alert for every transaction above Rs 2,000 to all our customers. Skimming of credit cards is generally done when a customer places a mail or phone order transaction.” In additions to mobile alerts, HDFC bank also provides an extra security layer for all credit and debit card customers. Through this facility, the cardholder can create his own additional password, which provides an additional security layer for all On-line transactions, said HDFC Bank credit card marketing head Parag Rao. Another kind of credit fraud happens even before a new card has been received from the bank. If you have just received a new credit card from the bank, but discover that it already has a charge attached on it, don’t be surprised. Credit card number generators are freely available online (on sites like http://www.brothersoft.com) which claim to generate card numbers of various companies starting from ‘5’ (Master Card) or ‘4’ (Visa) or other digits. It also generates 13, 16, 18 or 19 digit card numbers. These generators use the same algorithms like `Luhn formula’ used by government agencies and banks to generate numbers.

Dilbert's Theorem on Salary

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Dilbert's Theorem on Salary-

Dilbert's Theorem on Salary states that engineers and scientists never earn as much salary as business executives, sales people & management guys. This theorem can now be supported by a mathematical equation based on the following three postulates: Postulate 1: Knowledge is Power (Knowledge=Power) Postulate 2: Time is Money (Time=Money) Postulate 3: (as every engineer knows): Power=Work/Time It therefore follows: Knowledge = Work / Time And since Time = Money, We have: Knowledge = Work / Money. Solving for Money, we get: Money = Work / Knowledge Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero, Money approaches infinity, regardless of the amount of Work done. Conclusion 1: The Less you Know, the More you Make.

types of world economies

hi, if you find this massage is interesting, share with your friends 1)TRADITIONAL ECONOMICS You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies and the economy grows. You retire on the income...... 2)INDIAN ECONOMICS You have two cows. You worship them.... 3)PAKISTAN ECONOMICS You don't have any cows. You claim that the Indian cows belong to you. You ask the US for financial aid, China for military aid, Britain for warplanes, Italy for machines, Germany for technology, France for submarines, Switzerland for loans, Russia for drugs and Japan for equipment. You buy the cows with all this and claim of exploitation by the world.... 4)AMERICAN ECONOMICS You have two cows. You sell one and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. You profess surprise when the cow drops dead. You put the blame on some nation with cows & naturally that nation will be a danger to mankind. You wage a war to save the world and grab the cows... 5)FRENCH ECONOMICS You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows. 6)GERMAN ECONOMICS You have two cows. You reengineer them so that they live for 100 years, eat once a month and milk themselves... 7)BRITISH ECONOMICS You have two cows. You declare they are both mad.... 8)ITALIAN ECONOMICS You have two cows. You don't know where they are. You break for lunch.... 9)SWISS ECONOMICS You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you. You charge others for storing them.... 10)JAPANESE ECONOMICS You have two cows. You redesign them so that they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create cute cartoon cow images called Cowkimon and market them worldwide...

11)RUSSIAN ECONOMICS You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 17 cows. You give up counting and open another bottle of vodka... 12)CHINESE ECONOMICS You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim full employment, high bovine productivity and arrest anyone reporting the actual numbers....

Property market crash in the US spreads to Spain

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The slump in Spain's house prices is beginning to bite into the whole economy, according to latest figures and official data from analysts and the government. After almost a decade of boiling, fuelled by overseas demand for the country's sun-drenched villas, Spanish property market is declining. Some market experts see what is happening in Spain as the clear indication of US property crash spreading across the Atlantic. Data released by the Spanish statistical office (INE) in March-end strongly suggest that the market has now taken a dramatic turn. In the 12 months to January, completed house sales were down 27 per cent on the previous 12 months. Sales of second-hand dwellings, representing more than half of total sales, fell 36 per cent over the same period, while sales of new houses were down 15 per cent. Figures were consistent with mortgage market as total lending to home buyers fell 28 per cent over the period. In a recent report on European housing market, S&P cited Spain, Ireland and UK as the most vulnerable for a possible sharp decline in house prices. In case of Spain, the report recalled a warning by S&P in 2005 of the need for a cooling down in Spanish property market. The market kept boiling until a slump last year when house price growth slowed to three per cent from nine per cent in 2006. The sheer demand for housing in peak years, especially by foreign buyers, led to huge supply through unprecedented construction activity. That helped fuel growth in the economy as a whole. Another consequence was keeping unemployment at low levels, and even opening the way for an influx of expat workers – mainly North African. A glut in house supply and weakening market means a sharp drop in reconstruction and rising unemployment, especially among migrant workers with more social and political implications. According to S&P, the biggest concern now is the lag between housing starts and the most recent trends in the market, as reflected by house price inflation and the number of actual sales. Housing starts stabilised in the second half of last year, but at still very high levels (650,000 annualised). At the same time, house price inflation decelerated steadily. The average number of housing starts in Spain over recent years totals 700,000 per year. Yet the population has only been rising by 600,000 per year. Even allowing for some catch-up earlier this decade, the supply of dwellings has outpaced demand (and obviously not every new addition to the total population requires a new home). Furthermore, UN projections indicate a slowdown in population growth in coming years, to about 500,000 per year. The share of residential investment to GDP increased to 9.3 per cent in 2006 and 2007, compared to an average for Spain since the early 1970s of 5.5 per cent and industrialised economies' average of around 6.5 per cent. As mentioned before, part of the demand in the market was foreign, but that is not sustainable and Spain began to feel the punch. As the booming property sector constituted a big share of gross domestic product (GDP), the decline now will wipe a considerable percentage of GDP growth. House prices in Spain are estimated to have increased by 190 per cent between 1997 and 2007, only Ireland and UK boomed the same or slightly more. The average GDP growth rate for the same period was 3.8 per cent. Sharp correction in the market, as expected, made many analysts downgrade the outlook for Spanish GDP growth to around one per cent this year, from almost two per cent previously. Spiralling decline in property market started by the first quarter of this year, manifested in a decline of residential investment and not only house price fall. Last year the decline in residential building permits was at 11 per cent, and in the fourth quarter alone the number of permits slumped by 29 per cent year on year. The Spanish Government is planning a spending increase on infrastructure in a bid to keep the construction sector afloat, but this might not absorb all employment shed by ailing residential investment. And most likely it would cut the government fiscal surplus of two per cent accrued during the boom and growth period.