Saturday, May 5, 2012

Windows 7.5 Mango and Gmail, "Attention Required" error

I just ran into this while trying to add my dads Gmail account to his new Nokia 900 Windows 7.5 phone. Spent ten minutes thinking I was using the wrong password. It turns out that Gmail implements some sort of Captcha on their authentication (probably only happens when you add your Gmail account to new device/phone). You won't see this when logging in through a browser, and nothing really tells you why authentication failed. Either way you must disabled it when adding the Gmail account to your new phone.

To do this go to this link (in a browser) and sign in with your account :
https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha

I'm not 100% on this, but I believe it temporarily disabled the Captcha requirement and let's the device/phone authenticate. I'm assuming once the account is added to the device/phone the Captcha is no longer required.

I still haven't figured out why one of my dads Gmail accounts actually had this authentication protection, but the other didn't.

To give credit, I found this information on this guys blog:
http://jonathanmumm.com/tech-it/fix-windows-7-phone-gmail-attention-required-error/

Thanks Jonathan Mumm, you saved me a few gray hairs.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Experian FreeCreditReport.com/ConsumerInfo.com Fraudulent Credit Card Charge for unknown purpose

I posted this on RipOffReport.com until I realized I actually have a blog :)

Noticed a charge on my American Express (AMEX) for $19.95 on a Sunday (4/29/12). Looked at the info:

EXPERIAN *CREDITR 877-297-7790

Charge: $19.95

Doing Business As:
CONSUMERINFOCOM

Merchant Address:
535 ANTON BLVD #100
COSTA MESA, CA 92626

I thought that was odd, since I've never been to the website and don't do any business with Experian. Also, I'm one of those people that is fairly aware when there is a sneaky checkbox that will sign you up to an offer, or those "free" gifts that automatically roll over into a monthly charge later.

Reason I'm creating this report is because I've noticed a lot of people complaining about the same thing online, and a large uptick in complaints in the last few months (especially as of may 1st):

http://danbeahm.blogspot.com/2012/02/fraud-alert-experian-charging-peoples.html
http://complaintwire.org/complaint/EpUBAAAAAAA/mni-credit-report-monitoring
http://complaintwire.org/complaint/oCWHgTlFZAU/experian-credit-report

Not sure if my card was compromised, or Experian was compromised and already had my card from some other transaction. Regardless, something really screwed up is at hand, and I'm surprised it's still happening.

Update: Just got home and received a letter from American Express stating that my account was one of many account compromised due to a data breach from a payment service provider. I'm assuming this is related to the Global Payments data breach from last month and that's how they got my credit card number. From the information I've been reading, scammers are using these stolen credit card numbers to run credit reports on other people (to get more information for future identity theft).

Link to one of the articles about this

One thing that's kind of bugging me though is that it shows only 1.5 million cards compromised, and the letter from American Express only came today. Maybe there was another data breach since then that I haven't read about?