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“He’s a very suave con artist,” Joan says now. “He's very persistent. He is determined. I was thinking, _I’m 84 years old, you dumb bunny. And you shouldn’t be harassing me_.” He even
set up a conference call with Joan and seven men who purportedly, with his help, received refunds for time-share investments. Looking back, she has no way of knowing if their representations
were real. It was years ago that Joan bought her time-share at a sales event in Las Vegas that drew her by advertising “a free lunch, free this and free that,” she says. The deal never
lived up to its promise. She took a couple of trips but was often told the vacation spots she wanted already had been booked — supposedly — by VIP owners. Ultimately, she relinquished
ownership. TREASURY DEPARTMENT WARNING On its website, the Treasury Department warns that scams invoking its name are common. There are numerous telephone, mail and email scams where
individuals claim to be Treasury Department employees and offer to grant money, or they threaten arrests or fines unless your personal information is provided. The department advises: * If
you have received a suspicious message from someone who claims to be a Treasury employee but does not purport to be from the IRS, report it to the Treasury inspector general by emailing
[email protected] or calling 800-359-3898. * If you have received a suspicious message from someone claiming to be from the IRS, report it by emailing [email protected] or calling
800-366-4484. Eva Velasquez is president and CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center. Eva Velasquez How the fraudster obtained Joan’s personally identifiable information may never be
known. But data breaches, exposures and leaks this year are on track to shatter a record, says Eva Velasquez, president and CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a national nonprofit in
San Diego. When hackers steal information, it’s a data breach. That differs from a data leak, which involves open-source information that, on a site such as LinkedIn, is not considered
personally identifiable information but when aggregated in a single file left unsecured or stolen poses the risk of an identity crime. Exposure involves information accessible by an
unauthorized person without evidence the data was viewed, copied or removed. The total for the first nine months of this year was 1,291 data compromises affecting more than 281 million
victims, the center says. The record for data compromises was set in 2017: 1,529 incidents and 1.8 billion victims, a figure dwarfed by the staggering 2.5 billion victims in 2016.