Donna Gonzalez recently posted her resume on websites like Career Builder.Com and quickly got a reply, “They just need people who already had bank accounts set up, so we could cash the checks for them.”

According to Donna, a company called Global Healthcare Inc.,out of London, sent her a contract asking her to cash checks and wire them the money. It was supposedly quicker than doing it overseas. Donna was promised 10-percent of the money cashed, “It looked legitimate I mean I went to paralegal school and I knew some contractual law and so the contract looked legitimate, but it wasn’t evidentially.”

After Donna cashed a check from a “so called” customer and wired the company more than 25-hundred dollars, she later found out the check was fake and she was the one who was stuck paying, “I was so devastated I cried so hard.”

Sgt. Kevin Smith of the St. Petersburg Police Department says, he gets calls like this one at least two times a week, “It’s heartbreaking because you really hate to see people out there trying to work, trying to sell something to be taken advantage of.”

Sgt. Kevin Smith says websites like Career Builder.Com are safe, but people need to be more aware of who they’re dealing with, “Unfortunately anybody has a right to log in and look at those resumes so you really don’t know who’s actually offering you a job.”

He says thieves are also targeting victims through the mail and even fax machines. . Sgt. Smith says it’s difficult to catch the thieves because of trying to coordinate with other countries. He says banks don’t take responsibility for these incidents, because it’s the account holder who’s cashing the checks, even though they’re not aware they’re fake.

Donna now believes if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is, “I’m really afraid to go on line anymore and even answer emails from companies.” While she paid an expensive price, she hopes others learn from her experience

First Coast News

Social networking sites are not only biting into workplace productivity — they can also pose a major security risk. The use of social-networking sites at work has made companies more vulnerable to viruses and other threats.

Social networking sites are not only biting into workplace productivity — they can also pose a major security risk, new research shows.

In a national survey of more than 800 employees across a range of industries, more than half said they spent at least an hour a week accessing blogs, chat rooms, videos, and other social networking tools and services at work, according to Clearswift, a Redwood, Calif.-based Internet security consulting firm.

Clearswift COO Ian Bowles said that despite the well-known dangers of online viruses, bugs, spam, and scams, most business owners are still far too casual with the Internet.

He said the survey results should “raise a red flag” for employers about their susceptibility to data leaks over the Web.

Still, more than half of the employees polled said they felt entitled to use the Internet for personal reasons at work, the survey found.

In recent years, many businesses have included an “acceptable use” policy for workplace Internet use in updated employee handbooks — only 29 percent of the business owners surveyed by Clearswift outright banned the use of social networking sites at work.

Nancy Cooper, an employment law attorney with Portland, Ore.-based Bullivant Houser Bailey PC, advices employers to have policies in place for blogs, chat rooms, and other online activity. Though employers can’t necessarily prevent workers from accessing Web 2.0 sites, they can make it clear there will be consequences for sharing confidential business data, said Cooper, an Inc.com columnist.

Firing an employee for an online infraction is now common enough that legal experts refer to it simply as “dooced,” a term coined from a case involving the author of a blog named dooce.com who was fired for posting angry messages about her employer and co-workers.

inc.com

Terrifying tales of wicked workers and tips on how to avoid them.

When you run a small business, it’s not always easy to find employees who can cover the range of skills you want at the salary available,” explains Missy Rule, the owner of a small Midwestern shipping company. For example, when seeking an administrative assistant, she needed to hire someone who could also help with receptionist duties, accounting, invoicing and filing.

Late last summer Rule thought she had found a reliable hire in Abbie Normal (names and identifying details have been changed throughout this article), who was “very capable, smart, quick and learned really well.” Rule checked references, and a background check came back clean.

Read complete story at CNN Money.

Ever suspect your employees are fudging their timesheets by clocking in for one another? A new biotechnology tool from VeriTask Software can help ensure employees are recording and reporting their hours with absolute accuracy.

VeriTask’s Biometric Time Clock verifies an employee’s identity through his or her fingerprint. As employees enter and leave the workplace, they check in using a fingerprint scanner, which keeps a precise record of the time. The system can be upgraded to manage a virtually unlimited number of employees, while attendance data can be easily exported to QuickBooks or Microsoft Excel.

The professional version of the Biometric Employee Time Clock, which includes a fingerprint reader and software to manage up to 50 employees, costs $399. An enterprise version, which can manage up to 100 employees, costs $699.

inc.com

eBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman said increasingly sophisticated Internet scams were eroding the trust of online shoppers and hurting e-commerce.

She also called on industry leaders to work together more closely at a time when legitimate businesses must thwart global criminal organizations vying for control over sensitive financial data traveling across the Internet.

“Security on the Net is actually an arms race in its most classic form,” she said. “As we build sophisticated tools and fraud models to keep the bad guys out, the bad guys just come up with new ways to target us.”

Whitman said a particularly vexing challenge is safeguarding Internet users from “phishers,” who try to obtain sensitive personal information by masquerading as a trusted Web site or e-mailer. These scams, Whitman said, are eroding the trust of Internet shoppers and hurting e-commerce.

BusinessWeek

What could you do with technology that turns all your employees’ camera-enabled cell phones into networked videocams?

A company called Reality Mobile has already used it to help FBI agents patrol the Super Bowl. Now it’s finding that the same idea could potentially do everything from oil-field analysis to YouTube-like video sharing.

This fall the Virginia-based company will launch a fully customizable version of its software, RealityVision, which works with any Palm OS- or Windows-based wireless device with a built-in camera. “The phone thinks it’s just capturing a video clip like normal,” explains CEO Dave Rensin. “But we’re really stealing that data.”

Along with a video signal, the phones send their GPS coordinates, giving your headquarters as many roving eyes in the field as your employees have phones.

That’s why Rensin has a long list of potential uses for the product. Reality Mobile has already been selling law enforcement on the $250,000 RealityVision system. (The LAPD beta-tested it.)

Business 2.0 Magazine

Everyone’s so paranoid about the RFID chips that are already in place in so many parts of our lives, so here’s an item (via Engadget and Pink Tentacle) about Hitachi’s new powder-sized RFID chips to make us even more scared of Big Brother (or little-Brother-ID thief). RFID chips are tiny microchips that use radio waves to do everything from conduct credit card transactions (as on those little key-fob-Paypass MasterCard thingies) and pay for tolls (EZ Pass and its ilk) to keeping track of your devices and travel (U.S. passports)

Hitachi plans to start marketing these new chips—seriously no bigger than a speck of dust at 0.05 x 0.05 mm—in two to three years. The company says this super-tiny chip can be used in paper, currency, gift certificates, and the like, but as some sites have pointed out, today’s chips are already small enough for those uses. So, as Engadget cracked, does this mean we should be watching what we eat in case of some James-Bond-style pepper-shaker swap?

tech.yahoo.com