Good news for NTL customers...

I noticed on the BBC website yesterday an article about my all time favourite company, NTL.

Apparently they have managed to reduce their losses this year thanks in part to a policy of “aggressively removing delinquent or non-paying customers”.

I assume the definition of a non-paying customer is someone like my girlfriend, who got a nice letter from a debt collection agency threatening her with court action to recover an unpaid NTL debt. A debt that arose because NTL forgot to take the payment from her bank account!!!

It seems that there is no limit to NTL’s incompetence with regard to customer care or the depths to which they will stoop!

Long live BT!!!!

Now it's the poor car's who are having their ID's stolen!!!!

Another item to hit the news recently has been that of car cloning, i.e. where someone puts a false number plate on a car, goes through a speed camera, gets nabbed and you (the rightful owner of that registration) gets the bill. Apparently this crime is on the increase too.

In the article on the news, someone stated that all you need to clone a car is a copy of the vehicles registration and its VIN number. I don’t reckon you even need that!

I assume the requirement for the VIN number is so that you can send off for a replacement logbook and pop into Halfords and get a new set of number plates made up.

Obviously my first question… Is it really that easy to get a copy of the vehicles registration document? Simply walk up to a car, note down the number plate and the vehicle VIN number considerately displayed in the windscreen and send off for the logbook? Surely not!!!

But hang on, this assumes you actually want to get a set of legal number plates made up. If you simply want to get away with speeding, why go to all that aggro? Simply by some sticky vinyl (white for the front and yellow for the back), some black electricians tape and create your own number plate. It may not fool a policeman in the street (and what are the odds of coming across one of them?) but it’ll almost certainly pass muster when captured on a speed or CCTV camera!

And that’s where the problem lies to my mind. It used to be that before a conviction was secured for a crime, the prosecution had to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you were guilty of said crime. With the advent of speed cameras etc. this onus of proof has now been reversed.

If your car is pictured speeding, the assumption is that you are the guilty party unless you can prove otherwise (usually by shopping the real driver). The only evidence available is a poor quality picture of the vehicle and some computer generated information. This evidence is held up as infallible (just like the speed camera that measured a solid brick wall travelling at 58 mph) and so it is up to you to prove otherwise. In other words, you now have to prove your innocence rather than the state having to prove your guilt.

Thus I put a false plate on my car (yellow vinyl, white vinyl and black tape at the ready), drive around like a lunatic and you get a number of speeding tickets. The system then assumes you are the guilty party unless you can prove otherwise. As this may well come down to your word against the systems, you will face an uphill battle at best as the system has already assumed you are a criminal scumbag and therefore you must be lying.

This is just another example of a quick fix answer causing a whole new set of problems, problems that were patently obvious if only someone had thought about it in the first place!

Perhaps there is a simple answer to ID theft...

I noticed that the subject of ID theft has been in the news a lot recently. Unfortunately I am at a loss as to the reason for this, other than perhaps to create the right political environment to facilitate the easing in of the governments ID card legislation?

Now as I understand it, ID theft can range from simply having someone make a purchase using your credit card right through to forging passports and human trafficking, with the majority of people being affected by the former rather than the latter.

According to the recent spate of press reports, most people who experience ID theft appear to experience financial hardship rather than anything more serious, with fraudulent use of credit cards topping the list by quite some margin.

Now I must be missing something obvious here, as I would have thought beating the vast majority of this type of crime would actually be very simple and NOT require the introduction of a very expensive and worthless ID card?

Two things happened to me recently that have made me think this. Firstly, I had some fraudulent activity on my credit card (see Tesco Personal Finance and forethought… now there’s an oxymoron!) and my girlfriend had to apply for a replacement water bill.

In the case of the water bill, my girlfriend needed a copy of her last bill in order to pass it on to the purchaser of her house. She contacted the water company, explained the situation and asked for a copy. The person on the other end of the line then asked where she wanted the new bill sending! Yes folks, it really is that easy to get a copy of someone’s bills!!! Why send any bill to anywhere other than the billing address? Surely that simple step stops anyone without access to the house actually getting hold of it, or at least lengthens the odds of this happening.

So I got thinking (yes I know…) Surely the easiest way to counter ID fraud at this level is to instigate a few simple procedures…

Why don’t staff in shops start checking the signature on the back of the card any more? A simple step that would surely be a useful first line of defence? Unfortunately I fear this will only get worse as we start to rely on chip and pin as the answer to all our ills.

Why don’t we go back to the days when goods could only be sent to the cardholder’s address? If goods are purchased you at least get to know about it as soon as they arrive rather than a month down the line when the statement arrives. For years this was the case and everyone coped with it.

Why don’t we require a signed form for all credit applications, a form that can only be posted to the applicant’s address? That way anyone applying for a loan in someone else’s name would have to wait for the signed credit agreement to arrive back before collecting the goods. We recently signed a £2,500 credit agreement at a well-known furniture store and no proof of who we are was actually required. If it’s that simple to get credit and walk away with the good, it’s that simple to defraud the system.

Surely these are simple measures that would go quite a long way to helping with a burgeoning problem. Yes it would be a pain for a while but we would soon get used to it and change our expectations to suit.

Another benefit may be to reduce the countries spiralling debt problem, as people would no longer be able to run up tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt in a day.

So there you go, a few simple measures that will go a long way to solving a problem or two that does not require the introduction of an expensive ID card scheme and the criminalisation of thousands of innocent people. But will it ever happen?

Of course it won’t! These measures may well get people thinking about what they buy and whether they really need to buy on credit at all, not very good for the financial sector’s profits. It also means that the government would no longer be able to justify its ID database.

So as I see it, ID theft has increased in line with the deregulation of the market place. The easier it is to get credit, the easier it is to get credit in someone else’s name. Shops are more interested in selling goods to you, rather than making sure you can pay for them.

You go into a shop without the correct ID and most shops will make up what ID you produce in order to get a sale, assuming they ask for any ID at all!!! It is now laughably easy to get a credit card number and order goods over the Internet and get them shipped anywhere in the world.

A few simple steps would make it soooo much harder to get away with ID theft but no one has the will to do anything about it! The problem is, it’s a ‘not my problem culture’ amongst those who really should be doing the most to prevent this type of crime!