 | Restrict access to your e-gold account e-gold's Account Sentinel™ (a.k.a. AccSent™) enhances the security of your e-gold account by enabling you to direct the circumstances under which your account may be accessed. AccSent was designed to provide you an additional level of protection in the event your passphrase is compromised due to poor security practices on your part (we hope this does not describe you!). However, AccSent's features should not be regarded as diminishing the importance of reading and practicing ALL of the recommendations on this page. | ||||||||
 | Do not click links in unsolicited email messages
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 | Verify website identity before entering passphrase Fraudulent "phishing" websites designed to trick you into divulging your passphrase or other sensitive information are common. Spoofed e-mail (see above) is commonly used to lure victims to phishing websites. Never assume that a website is the website you intended to be at based on its appearance. Before entering your e-gold passphrase, ensure you are at the real e-gold website by:
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 | Keep your operating system and applications updated Use Windows Update to make sure you have the latest security patches installed. Also check for updates to your application programs, especially Microsoft Office. | ||||||||
 | Use a hardware and/or software firewall A firewall can protect your computer from malicious traffic. A hardware firewall/router (such as the many offerings of companies like Linksys, D-Link, SMC, and others) acts as a barrier between the outside world and your computer. A software firewall, such as ZoneAlarm, performs that function to a lesser degree but can also block malicious programs on your computer from sending data out to the Internet. Windows XP includes a simple firewall, but it is disabled by default. The free version of ZoneAlarm does a very nice job. | ||||||||
 | Do not run untrusted applications Running any program that arrives via email or that was downloaded from the Internet can be dangerous. Only run applications that you wish to grant complete access to your computer and the data contained on it. | ||||||||
 | Upgrade to a better web browser You're already using Better MoneyTM - now choose a better browser. Mozilla's Firefox is available for almost every operating system and has many security and privacy advantages. Try "tabbed browsing". Manage your cookies. Block pop-up windows. The features are many, but the cost is low - in fact free. (Note that e-gold donations are accepted by the Mozilla Foundation). | ||||||||
 | Use an Anti-Virus program If you follow all of the the above recommendations a virus will have difficulty infecting your computer. However, since a computer virus can be a vehicle for a criminal to gain total control of your computer and thereby any information stored on, sent by, or received by your computer, it is prudent to install antivirus software from a reputable source and run it regularly. Since new viruses are discovered daily, it is important to keep antivirus software and the virus definitions it uses for detection up to date at all times. |
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Security Recommendations
in the browser status bar.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
How Did I Get Rich ONLINE ?
This short introduction explains the basics of trading Forex online, a brief explanation of the markets and the major benefits of trading Forex online. There are also two scenarios describing the implications of trading in a bear as well as bull market to better acquaint you with some of the risks and opportunities in the largest and most liquid market in the world
As an additional aid for those who are new to Forex, there is also a glossary at the bottom of this text which explains some of the terms used in connection with currency trading. ection with currency trading.- Overview
Foreign exchange , forex or just Forex are all terms used to describe the trading of the world's many currencies. The forex market is the largest market in the world, with trades amounting to more than $1.5 trillion every day. This is more than one hundred times the daily trading on the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) . Most forex trading is speculative , with only a few percent of market activity representing governments' and companies' fundamental currency conversion needs.Unlike trading on the stock market, the forex market is not carried out by a central exchange, but on the “interbank” market , which is thought of as an OTC (over the counter ) market. Trading takes place directly between the two counterparts necessary to make a trade, whether over the telephone or on electronic networks all over the world. The main centres for trading are Sydney, Tokyo, London, Frankfurt and New York. This worldwide distribution of trading centres means that the forex market is a 24-hour market.
- Trading Forex
A currency trade is the simultaneous buying of one currency and selling of another one. The currency combination used in the trade is called a cross (for example, the Euro/US Dollar, or the GB Pound/Japanese Yen.). The most commonly traded currencies are the so-called “majors” – EURUSD, USDJPY, USDCHF and GBPUSD.
The most important forex market is the spot market as it has the largest volume. The market is called the spot market because trades are settled “immediately” or on the spot. In practice this means within two banking days.
- Forward Outrights For forward outrights, settlement on the value date selected in the trade means that even though the trade itself is carried out immediately, there is a small interest rate calculation left. This is because if you trade e.g. NOKJPY, you get almost 7% (annual) interest in Norway and close to 0% in Japan. So, if you borrow money in Japan, to finance the trade as you must have one currency with which to buy or another, and place it in Norway you have a positive interest rate differential. This differential has to be calculated and added to your account. You can have both a positive and a negative interest rate differential, so it may work for or against you when you make a trade. The interest rate differential doesn't usually affect trade considerations unless you plan on holding a position with a large differential for a long period of time. The interest rate differential varies according to the cross you are trading. On the USDCHF, for example, the interest rate differential is quite small, whereas the differential on NOKJPY is large.
- Trading on Margin
Trading on margin means that you can buy and sell assets that represent more value than the capital in your account. Forex trading is usually done with relatively little margin since currency exchange rate fluctuations tend to be less than one or two percent on any given day. To take an example, a margin of 2.0% means you can trade up to $500,000 even though you only have $10,000 in your account. In terms of leverage this corresponds to 50:1, because 50 times $10,000 is $500,000, or put another way, $10,000 is 2.0% of $500.000. Using this much leverage gives you the possibility to make profits very quickly, but there is also a greater risk of incurring large losses and even being completely wiped out. Therefore, it is inadvisable to maximise your leveraging as the risks can be very high. For more information on the trading conditions at Saxo Bank, go to the Account Summary on your Client Station and open the section entitled "Trading Conditions" found in the top right-hand corner of the Account Summary.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
More about e-gold
So a year after the Department of Justice raided his offices, Douglas Jackson, president of Gold and Silver Reserve, which operates e-gold, has been wading deep into his customer transaction logs to identify and fight back against people who misuse his system. In the last month, he's blocked about 2,000 accounts from his system, and he's voluntarily turned over detailed account and transaction histories to federal law enforcement.
In the process, Jackson says he's exposed an illicit and previously invisible economic underground.
"It's like discovering an undisturbed tomb in Egypt where you've got this archaeological thing," Jackson says about the wealth of data he's uncovered. "There will never be another crack like this one where all of these people have left their footprints with memos that sometimes give us clues as to what they're doing."
E-gold is a privately issued digital currency backed by real gold and silver stored in banks in Europe and Dubai. Jackson says about 1,000 new e-gold accounts are opened daily, and the system processes between 50,000 and 100,000 transactions a day.
With a value independent of any national legal tender, the electronic cash has cultivated a libertarian image over the years, while drawing the ire of law enforcement agencies who frequently condemn it publicly as an anonymous, untraceable criminal haven, inaccessible to police scrutiny.
Jackson says the image is false. Although a user can open an account using a fraudulent name and a proxy server that shields his or her IP address, a permanent record of every transaction remains in the e-gold system, which can help law enforcement agencies track criminals.
Jackson says he first became aware that credit card thieves were laundering money through e-gold from 2004 news stories about a Secret Service bust of Shadowcrew, a website where carders congregated. He contacted the Secret Service and pleaded with them to work with him to catch the carders, but the agency inexplicably rebuffed him.
Last December, the Department of Justice raided the Melbourne, Florida, office of Gold and Silver Reserve, and seized more than 100 boxes of paper records in a move dubbed Operation Goldwire.
"They basically raped our computers and also took us offline for 36 hours, took all the paper out of our office," Jackson says. The government also froze Gold and Silver's U.S. bank account. The company survived, Jackson says, only because its euro, pound and yen accounts are maintained outside the United States.
Jackson says the criminal affidavit, filed under seal, accused Gold and Silver of aiding terrorists and child pornographers. But prosecutors later dropped the criminal claim, replacing it with a civil complaint charging Gold and Silver with operating as an unlicensed money-transmitting business. Jackson's lawyers say the charge is bogus because Gold and Silver isn't a money transmitter, since the company doesn't accept cash from customers, only wire transfers. That case is on hold until April, and a Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the suit.
Rather than attack him, Justice officials and the Secret Service should have been working with him, says Jackson. Because all the while they were trying to build a case against e-gold, he was gathering evidence that could help them battle the real criminals.
Around the time of the Shadowcrew bust, Jackson's staff developed a method for doing global searches in e-gold transactions. So Jackson decided to see if he could find carders in his system by searching the "memo" field, where -- like the memo line on a check -- the sender can note the reason for the transaction. Jackson says some carders, apparently so convinced of their invisibility, don't try to hide the nature of their activity.
He searched keywords from news articles about carders, such as "cvv," "dumps" and "cob." The first two terms refer to data encoded on the magnetic stripe of credit cards; the last one stands for "change of billing," referring to credit card accounts for which a crook has changed the billing address to a mail drop under his control.
Jackson also searched the online nicknames of specific carders that law enforcement agents mentioned in news reports or at a cybercrime conference Jackson attended: names like Zoomer, Kayser Sose, Smash, Segvec, Jilsi, Ragoo and John Dillinger, a carder who described his crimes for Wired News earlier this year and who recently signed a plea agreement to cooperate with authorities.
Jackson says some culprits that authorities deemed "unfindable" were easy to track through e-gold. One appeared to be a high school kid in Louisville, Ohio, judging from information gleaned from his transactions. Jackson tracked two others to Egypt after one of them converted e-gold to cash and had an intermediary load it onto a debit card sent to him by courier.
Jackson identified a core group of accounts that appeared to involve carding, and made lists of accounts that exchanged e-gold with them. Patterns emerged. Beginning earlier this year, for example, one account-holder in New York purchased postal orders worth about $6,000 twice a month from three different post offices, exchanged them for e-gold and transferred the funds to an account-holder in the Ukraine. Altogether he purchased about 30 postal orders totaling more than $150,000.
In other accounts he found a $17,000 transaction supposedly "for beer" and $10,000 for Louis Vuitton purses. Over two weeks last February, one account-holder moved $29,000 worth of e-gold to purchase Sony Vaio computers, followed two days later by $30,000 for more Sony Vaios, and $40,000 four days after that. The recipient of the funds accumulated more than $900,000 in e-gold over a brief period of time, more than half of which remained parked in his account.
The timing of the transactions, last spring, corresponded with news articles reporting a serious wave of debit card breaches across the country that caused several banks to reissue compromised cards.
By matching other data, like time stamps, IP addresses and hashes of passwords, Jackson could sometimes identify when one person controlled or used different accounts. "The good ones will have a different IP address every time they touch the internet," he says. "But every once in a while you get one of these bad guys on one of these accounts where ... he may use a fixed IP."
Jackson decided that law enforcement needed to know about what he'd found.
He'd received and complied with hundreds of subpoenas in the past -- from FBI, Secret Service, Drug Enforcement Agency and international law enforcement agencies. But this time he had trouble finding someone to work with him. Since the Secret Service had already dismissed him, he approached the FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service, but got the runaround. Jackson said one agency wanted his company to sign an agreement stating he wouldn't be immune from prosecution if authorities, in the process of obtaining information from him, found something that could incriminate e-gold.
He refused to sign, but began assisting postal inspectors and other agents voluntarily.
Jackson acknowledges some discomfort over the decision to give information to the feds without legal process -- a move that could save e-gold from further law enforcement aggression, while tarnishing its libertarian sheen.
His lawyers aren't bothered by the move, however. They say agents repeatedly promised to provide Jackson with court orders since last February but have not come through.
"You have a very strong documented relationship with these agents asking about particular people with the promise that they are going to be subpoenaing," says Jackson attorney Andrew Ittleman. "Just because they never ultimately gave him a subpoena doesn't put the fault on Jackson -- it's on the agents. He was acting in good faith."
His lawyers also say that once the company discovered evidence of possible wrongdoing, it had no choice but to hand over information to the government. Jackson could even have been charged with aiding and abetting money launderers under federal statutes if he didn't report the suspicious activity.
"E-gold, because of the way in which it operates, creates the potential for a misuse," says lead attorney Mitchell Fuerst. "And to the extent that that can happen, I think the company has an ethical and a legal obligation to prevent those crimes from being committed."
But the company thinks it's unlikely that anyone involved in illicit activity would sue e-gold for blocking their account or giving their data to law enforcement.
Kevin Bankston, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says e-gold is violating its privacy policy, which states that the company won't hand over data except under court order. Its actions "could open it to liability under contract violation and false advertising and unfair competition claims," he says.
In November, Jackson began running an automated script to blacklist accounts he identified as suspicious. The digital funds aren't frozen, and the account holder can conceivably get the money out by transferring it to another account he controls, or to a different e-gold customer. But then those accounts get blocked, too.
"We're looking to make these people into vagabond zombies," he says. "They can log into the account and send payment to someone who's willing to accept payment from them, but at that other person's risk."
But the aggressive policing is chafing some users, who say they did nothing wrong and were improperly banned.
Cesar Carranza runs a business called uBuyWeRush selling liquidation and overstock merchandise online and from three California stores. He uses e-gold for some overseas customers because, unlike credit card and PayPal transactions, e-gold purchases are irreversible and there are no charge-backs to the merchant.
"I am a reputable merchant," he says. "I am not a con artist or a thief."
Carranza was arrested in 2004 but never charged with anything. At the time, he was selling MSR-206s through eBay -- devices used to encode data on the magnetic strip of credit cards. It's not illegal to sell them, but carders often use them to code stolen credit and debit card numbers onto blank cards. Carranza says police accused him of selling merchandise to terrorists. He's since sold the MSR part of his business.
Last month, e-gold blocked two of his accounts containing about $19,000, providing little information about why. Carranza says the block hasn't hurt his business but he'll never use e-gold again and is considering legal action to get his funds. "I no longer trust the e-gold integrity," he says.
