KINGSQUEAK.ORG & KC2RGW.COM

Some light reading for a Monday.

What collapsing empire looks like – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

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So today I tried to pay for goods using PayPal as I’ve done since 2001. My transaction was refused. It turns out there is a cumulative lifetime limit of $10k for using PayPal via a credit card. Who knew?

I use PayPal so that there is a proxy between my information and various vendors on line. The entire point is to have the CC vendor AND PayPal as levers should any issues arise.

PayPal wants me to submit my ACH routing information for my checking or savings account in order to become ‘verified’ and in turn, lift this arbitrary lifetime limit. Let me explain why I’m even writing this. There is NO way I’m submitting my ACH account information to an online vendor or anyone at all…period.

Years ago, I got into a dispute with a very disreputable RIM Blackberry CDPD based web access company. Basically a pager company that had web browsing on the original 957 Blackberry. I disputed the service with them, it was lousy and they basically told me to go scratch. I cancelled my account with them.

One mistake; I had set up a monthly auto debit from my checking account to make the bill pay easier. This company proceeded to file withdrawals from my account $40 at a time, attempting to basically run my account up to about $550 for the cost of the Blackberry. I’d told them I’d send it back, but they didn’t want it back. I never authorized them to charge me for it, but they went ahead pillaging my account anyway.

I only realized it happened (pre-internet banking) because they overdrafted my account and the bank put me into collections over a $150 or so overdraft…never even called me to ask about it. Once I caught up to the whole mess, the bank refused to do anything at all to get my money back and I wound up having to pay them all sorts of penalties on top of losing the money itself.

This made me wonder about the ACH system and I did some research into it. Years later I met a US Treasury agent and he explained the entire thing to me.

The ACH system (on the bottom of a check, the account number and routing number) that places like Telecheck or now, many online vendors use to debit your account (i.e. to PULL funds FROM your account vs you PUSHING funds TO them) is a very murky system. There is no authentication on this system. All someone has to do is actually posess your account number and the routing number and they can make a withdrawal. They don’t even need to know your name or any other bits of identity, they simply just need your two numbers. Posession of these numbers implies consent for account access. This is _incredible_ and most people are not aware of this.

There is a tiny bit of protection on this system. Cases/complaints are handled by the Secret Service. However there is a tiny catch. The minimum dollar amount (I may be off a bit, but it’s still a ludicrously high number) for them to even take a complaint is $300,000.00. Can you guess what the number one most common dollar amount is for fraud on this system? Yup, $299,999.99.

This means that if you have $100k in your savings account, it’s completely fair game for anyone who gains access to your account. Nobody will even attempt to track this fraud down and the bank will not make good on fraud via the fed wire system.

The moral of this story is simply

DO NOT EVER GIVE YOUR ACH ROUTING INFO to anyone, EVER.

If you want to configure bill pay etc, only configure it when you PUSH funds TO the vendor. Never allow an automated debit of any sort really as you are consenting to that party to have access to your account. At least with a normal credit card, you have some recourse if you have fraud along these lines. With your checking and savings account via the Fed wire system, you have NONE.

This will be my last PayPal transaction after 9 years of using them without any issues at all. What a pain in the ass this will be.

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So I’m sitting at lunch, and on the table is a flyer for a benefit 5k run. Nothing too unusual and I make my usual crack about doing the run while smoking…until I read what the charity was for.

It was a charity that promotes “pro-social behavior in our children”. I went on to read that the primary mission for this group is to essentially squash any creative spirit in children and teach them how to conform to what their group sees as ‘acceptable behavior’. A truly disgusting premise.

What is going through people’s minds with this concept? We, on a grand scale are designing educational systems and media agendas to teach children to essentially keep their heads down and not to stand out from the herd.

This began years ago with the pro-socialist political agenda I had to suffer through as early as the 80′s in public schools. Things like “US History” were used to disguise various Marxist and Socialist agendas with revisionist concepts of the actual historical facts. It has now metamorphosed into this anti-creativity agenda designed to pretty much break the spirit of any creative personalities or squash any self image for those who are natural achievers or free thinkers.

Things have degenerated to the point where score keeping in any sort of intramural events is prohibited because the psyche of the losing team might be harmed by the thought that they have failed. If students aren’t all wearing the same uniform or listening to the same music, they are now profiled as though they are terrorists. We are churning out a raft of non-thinkers, afraid to express themselves for fear they may stand out from the herd and be ridiculed.

Those who ‘succeed’ in the new plan, will be zeros when it comes to any contribution to our society. We are raising a destiny of failure and self-loathing mediocrity with these methods. People will be living lives, hating themselves because they are not mediocre enough to fit in, rather than realizing that they are the ones the herd should be following.

We are stifling innovation with this system and the way our current domestic economy is heading, the only thing we have left to bank on is the very innovative spirit that we are programming out of people.

A little light reading…now WAKE UP!

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Heh, well not so funny having to fix it, but sorry for the spam I pushed out there briefly. A plugin for WordPress called Twitter Poster masks spamming with all sorts of nonsensical ‘opt out’ check boxes that don’t work and hidden code in base64 format.

Amazing how unethical people can be.

So avoid using Twitter Poster with WordPress.

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Yes it must be true because they are saying it is so, General Mills is drugging us with their latest creation, Cheerios.

FDA says Cheerios is a drug.

Some lawyer I bet retired off of this one….our country sucks more and more often lately

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