According to this week’s New Scientist, there is a new threat to our credit cards from Russia, which the banks and everyone else totally overlooked. Yet it is obvious, even without hindsight.
The why is obvious – millions of dollars there for the taking.
The how is very neat – a card is used to extract a printout of the other cards used, and their PINs, and it even encrypts the info so that the boss doesn’t have to get his hands dirty, and the foot soldier can’t steal the info for himself. Perhaps the funniest element is the fact there was also a way to have the cash machine eject the cash cassette! Surely anyone with a brain would see that as an obvious issue?
Windows is known to have many hundreds of thousands of viri, malware and trojan bits of software installed on the millions of machines in use, so how come did no-one at the banks think about how it might be an issue to use an ATM based on Windows?
These scams show that not only were most banks useless at their expert field of not going bankrupt, but they also messed up badly when working outside their chosen specialist subjects.
You can read the article in full here (though in a few weeks it will be subscribers only for the full article.)
So you want to be a locksmith?
Friday, June 12th, 2009Martin Pink, Rapid Locksmiths, Nottingham
The state of the locksmith industry is a poor one. Training houses are churning out hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new “locksmiths” every week. There are now estimated to be over 100 locksmith trainers in the UK 2, so you have to wonder where all those locksmiths are setting up, and where the mythical £1000+ a week is meant to be coming from.
If you are redundant, or leaving the forces, don’t bother becoming a locksmith. Even the best are struggling, and the phone books are full of those advertising for the small section of the market that is lock-out work.
Even if you are the best, will you afford the pages of advertising bought by the national franchises, who churn through half-trained locksmiths, paying them the few pounds they desperately need, before they go bust, whilst feathering their nests?
Or to compete against these same desperate folks when they offer to do a job cutting out the national for £5 over cost? Perhaps most tricky, is will you have the balls of steel required to stand there and tell a customer that the job you quoted at £40 will now be £250 because it was hard, or because you broke their lock, or because you have them over a barrel, because it is dark and cold and wet, or because you have to make the mortgage payment – and this was your only job this week?? – because you only did 15 hours of training before setting up?
Do some research before you start up, and you will find that (if you are in the UK) there are already many well-established outfits struggling, and time-served locksmiths leaving the profession to make more money as plumbers and joiners.
There are also plenty who did a two day course, failed to get even one job from it, and then… set themselves up as trainers! You can imagine the quality of the course, cadged from an already short course, then regurgitated to those who know no better. It’s one way of making the course pay for itself. Often, it’s the only way.
Be careful out there.
(And the same goes for those needing a locksmith as wanting to be a locksmith!)
1 – http://www.keyzine.co.uk/OnlineNews/May09-1/8PagesTraining.pdf
2 – A look at Google’s adverts reveals 12 companies paying for you just to click their advert as at 12th June 2009. The actual search results contain dozens more.
Tags: locksmith training, locksmiths training, redundancy money, redundancy training
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