However, the industry seems to be much more scam-ridden than many other industries.

The ideal way, and perhaps most cost effective, means of moving house is to do it yourself.

If that is not a viable option then the rest of this article will give you an insight into moving company scams and how to avoid them.

STRESSFUL TIME

I would imagine that most moving companies are completely legitimate, however, there are still a good few who may try to take advantage and trick you into paying more for their service than you may have bargained for.

Moving from one property to another can be a stressful enough time as it is, even if you are not a victim of a moving company scam.

There is the organisation of the process as well as the ever present risk of your goods being damaged or lost.

THE COMPETITION

Also, remember that you may well be obtaining quotes from several different companies and will need to sift through them all.

Importantly, you should remember that the lowest quote may not always represent the best value, especially if the moving company you choose is a scam, as the final cost may well end up significantly higher than your quote.

Generally, competition is a good thing for customers as it leads to good service at low prices.

Unfortunately, such competition also means lower profits for moving companies, leading to some less than honest ones finding alternative methods of making money.

TAKING HOSTAGES

One such means of making a profit involves the moving company taking your goods as ‘hostages’ and then demanding extra payments for unexpected problems they faced or any other additional costs that they can think of adding.

This is commonly achieved by getting a customer to sign a contract that has a lot of blank space on it where additional details can be added at a later date.

ESTIMATES

One of the most important factors in choosing a moving company is the estimate that they give you.

However, many people do not realise that there are 3 different types of estimate that may be offered up, and so believe that any price quoted will be exactly what they have to pay.

Therefore, it is important to be aware of the whole range of estimates with which you may be faced -

Binding Not-To-Be-Exceeded

This type of estimate is the most desirable for a customer. In simple terms, it means that you are quoted based on the weight of goods to be moved.

If your weight goes above the estimate then it is capped off at the agreed price.

Alternatively, if your weight is lower than expected then you will be expected to pay a lower price.

Therefore, a binding not-to-be-exceeded estimate will never lead to any surprises, unless it is a reduction in cost.

Fixed Price Agreement -

With this type of estimate you agree to pay the quoted figure, whatever the actual weight turns out to be.

For the customer, this may mean overpaying if the moving company misrepresents the weight.

For the company, there is a risk that the customer could add extra items, thereby increasing their weight to a much higher level than quoted for.

In this case, the driver on the day has the right to query the weight if he feels that it has increased significantly above the estimate.

Non-Binding Agreement -

In this instance you agree to be billed for the actual weight, on a dollar per pound basis.

This estimate is fair all round but could be costly if the customer’s weight is more than they anticipated.

TIPS FOR AVOIDING MOVING SCAMS

Beware of internet based moving companies – there are several such scammers that can be found across the internet.

They will suck you in with their low bids, which can often be calculated online.

However, further investigation may reveal a lack of contact details which is often a sure sign that they may be a less than totally trustworthy operation.

Instead, it may well be far better to utilise the services of a local company.

Ask friends, family and colleagues about their own experiences as personal recommendations are often a good indicator of the type of service that you will receive.

Remember that established companies, in most cases, must be doing something right.

Choose one that has been in business for some length of time rather than a new operation.

If possible, go and visit the company’s facilities and check out their yard and vans.

Also, get as much information about the operation as possible and search for them online to see if there is any negative feedback mentioned on the internet.

Check how the company is estimating the cost.

Some will quote based on the space required.

In this case you would be wise to enquire as to why this method is employed instead of weight – it is, after all, very easy to load goods in such a way that they take up a lot of space and therefore require one or more extra vans.

One sure fire way of avoiding a moving scam is to do it yourself.

You can hire a van for a fixed price and then either do the work yourself, ask friends and family, or employ people for the day at a fixed rate cost.

In the US there is a document called ‘Your Rights and Responsibilities When You Move’.

All moving companies are obliged to hold a copy and to make it available upon request. If the company you are considering does not have a copy, or does not make it available, then this should be considered a red flag.

In reality, however, KillRDDL.A is in fact a Trojan that replicates itself every time a user accesses a directory.

The Trojan tricks users by appearing to be a  Windows folder icon but actually has a hidden extension.

The folders created by KillRDDL.A have been spotted with various names including -

Angelina Jolie
Clips
Documents
Favorites
Flash Games
Games
My Documents
My Folder
Picture
Video
WallPapers

Note though that whenever the Trojan is executed it opens a web page that contains false results.

Judge George Wu has indicated that he will overturn the conviction of Drew, from Missouri,  who was alleged to have posed as a boy called ‘Josh Evans’ in a hoax on MySpace.

When ‘Josh’ later ‘dumped’ Megan Meier online the 13 year old committed suicide.

Last year Lori Drew was found guilty of illegally accessing computers but Judge Wu is now thinking of acquitting her as many people break the terms of service on social networking sites.

During Lori Drew’s trial prosecutors alleged that she set up a MySpace account in the name of Josh Evans in order to find out if Megan was spreading rumours about her daughter Sarah.

Drew was then alleged to have begun an online relationship with Megan which ended when a message was sent saying that, “the world would be better off without her.”

Drew’s lawyers had argued that,

“The government has created a fiction that Lori Drew somehow caused [Megan's] death, and it wants a long prison sentence to make its fiction seem real.”

Here’s more on the original trial.

Here are 6 of the more common ones -

SCHOLARSHIPS THAT NEVER MATERIALISE

Like those advanced fee email scams I am sure we all receive on a regular basis, many scholarship scams encourage you to send them the money up front whilst providing little, or nothing, in exchange.

Usually victims will just write off the expense, thinking that they simply didn’t win the scholarship.

SCHOLARSHIPS FOR PROFIT

This scam may look like a real scholarship program, however, it requires an application fee.

Scholarship scams such as this can often receive 5,000 to 10,000 applications and charges fees of $5 to $35 for each.

This allows them to pay out a $1,000 scholarship or two, making them look legitimate, and still pocket a hefty profit.

The chances of you winning such a scholarship from one of these scams are probably far less than your chances of winning the lottery!

THE ADVANCE FEE LOAN

In this scam you are offered an unusually low interest educational loan but with the caveat that you pay a fee before you receive it.

When you pay, the promised loan never materialises.

Real educational loans deduct the fees from the disbursement cheque.

They never require an up-front fee when you submit your application.

If the loan is not issued by a bank or other recognised lender, it is probably a scam.

Your local bank manager is probably well placed to advise on this.

THE SCHOLARSHIP PRIZE

This scam will inform you that you have won a college scholarship worth thousands of dollars.

However, there is a requirement that you pay a “disbursement” or “redemption” fee, or taxes, before they can release your prize.

If you discover that you have won a prize, yet don’t remember entering any contest or submitting an application, then be suspicious.

Be very suspicious.

THE GUARANTEED SCHOLARSHIP SEARCH SERVICE

There are some scholarship matching services that say they will guarantee that you will win a scholarship or they will refund your money.

Many of these simply pocket your money and disappear, or if they do send you a report of matching scholarships, you will find the list to be virtually worthless.

INVESTMENT REQUIRED FOR FEDERAL LOAN SERVICE

Some unscrupulous insurance companies and brokerage firms occasionally offer free financial aid seminars.

However, they turn out to be sales pitches for insurance, annuity and investment products.

If a sales pitch implies that purchasing such a product is a prerequisite to receiving federal student aid, it will be violating federal regulations and state insurance laws.

Due to this desire, many banking and investment institutions have engaged in lending practices that could, at best, be described as unethical.

Some may even believe them to be involved in housing fraud.

THE PROPERTY BOOM

There are some suspicions that the recent property booms, seen both in the UK and the US, were created, in part, by loan companies and banks who were looking to cash in on the lucrative mortgage market.

With ever-increasing property prices, that showed no signs of abating, many aspiring homeowners felt inclined to do whatever it took to get their feet onto the property ladder.

With the increase of property prices rising far quicker than inflation, and offering returns far in excessive of many other investment options, many people were quick to sign up for interest only mortgages, and other unethical schemes.

They hoped to make a quick, and substantial, profit.

The reality, however, may be somewhat different.

TRAPPED BY NEGATIVE EQUITY

Interest only loans, often coupled with high arrangement fees, leave those that took advantage of them in the position where they can typically only afford to pay back the interest.

Month after month, the outstanding capital balance remains the same.

Obviously, if housing prices had continued to rise rapidly, then a healthy profit could still be made from selling at a later date and benefiting from any remaining equity left after the principle sum had been repaid.

However, when the market crashes, as it may well be doing right now, the victim of this housing fraud will find themselves paying a loan for the rest of their lives.

This loan may well end up being secured on a property which is then valued at far less than the value of the mortgage.

Such negative equity can then lead the victim into a position where they are trapped and cannot move.

THE NEVER-ENDING LOAN

With such high interest rates on these types of mortgages, they are then trapped in a situation where they are paying through the nose for a home they will never actually get to own.

Additionally, having such a large credit burden may prevent them from sourcing funding from other lending firms and may even lead to poor credit ratings.

The housing market fraud is designed in such a way that the only people who consistently make profit from it, whatever happens in the property market, are the banks and other lending institutions.

Personally, I would never obtain a 100% or interest-only mortgage as it poses too big a risk.

By being careful, I have managed to keep an affordable roof over my head, despite getting divorced.

On the other hand, if you don’t take risks, you will never make big profits.

Have any of you reading this made a big profit, or a huge loss, by utilising interest only mortgages?

Last week a hoax suggested that Jeff Goldblum had passed away.

Yesterday the Miley Cyrus died in a car crash rubbish was being spread again.

Today its the turn of Rick Astley, ’star’ of those Rick Rollin’ youtube videos that I’m sure you love -

A report suggesting that Rick Astley was found unconscious in his room at the Angleterre Hotel in Berlin before later being pronounced dead is also a hoax but one that has proven popular with the folks on Twitter who have made the ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ artist a trending star today.

And so they should.

That is because as many as 80% of computers may have their systems infected with spyware.

If you think about it that is a huge number of infected PCs and, what is more, most of those users are blissfully unaware of what is lurking on their hard drives.

This is hope, however, in the form of antispyware if only the uniformed knew that they needed it in the first place!

Antispyware prevents spyware from damaging your computer in two ways – prevention and solution.

PREVENTING SPYWARE

In the ideal world antispyware prevents spyware from ever being installed on your system in the first place.

Some antispyware tools achieve this by scanning every piece of information that passes through your computer.

Everything it finds is then referenced against a database of all currently known spyware to see if their is a match.

This means that if any known spyware attempts to enter your system it will be immediately thwarted.

This disadvantage of such a preventative technique should be obvious though – if it ain’t in the database it ain’t gonna get detected and spyware does evolve quickly, just like viruses do.

A second preventative measure utilised by antispyware is to limit the activities of certain programs and applications that are known to be used in distributing spyware, one such example of which would be ActiveX.

This method means there will less chance of spyware entering the system surreptitiously.

SPYWARE SOLUTION

Antispyware tools are also able to deal with spyware that is already resident on a system as well via regular scans.

When found, all traces of the spyware are then deleted.

From a programming standpoint solutions are much easier to incorporate than preventative measures because of the fact that most spyware is introduced into systems via common processes that are natively employed by the computer anyway, such as via Flash which has many quite legitimate uses.

For that reason you wouldn’t want to disable Flash and so antispyware has many constraints to work around.

The only other real means of limiting spyware, besides the software solutions, involve cutting oneself off from local and external networks.

Can you imagine not being networked or connected to the internet in today’s age?

Didn’t think so!

So, as you can see, preventing spyware is not perhaps as easy as you may have first imagined but you can prevent it with the right tools.

More on those later…

Generally speaking, the media seems to focus it’s attention on personal identity theft but did you realise that corporate id theft is also growing at an alarming rate?

WHAT IS CORPORATE IDENTITY THEFT?

Corporate identity theft is the act of gaining personal and/or financial information from a company in order to facilitate the assumption of their identity in order to profit financially from transactions or purchases.

Perhaps the most common form of identity theft comes in the form of phishing emails – designed to appear to be from a legitimate bank, etc, in order to gain access to unsuspecting recipient’s accounts.

Scammers are also targeting corporations directly in order to gain access to bank accounts, arrange illegal money transfers, destroy credit ratings and also, in some cases, to cause harm to the reputation of a business.

WHAT ARE THE EFFECTS OF CORPORATE IDENTITY THEFT?

Here in the UK, for a business that has not adequately protected itself, a corporate identity thief can change registrations at Companies House, even to the point of registering themselves as a director.

Once they have done this they can then open new bank and credit accounts and even have goods shipped to a new address that they have added to the file, thereby putting company credit ratings at risk.

Of course the financial implications of the above may well pale into insignificance when compared to the damage that may be done to a victim corporation’s reputation and image.

Secondly, they were concerned at what effects the worm would have on their PC if their worst fears were realised.

In some respects, it reminded me of a similar event at the turn of the century – the Y2K fervour that had everyone in a panic but then passed with virtually no incidence.

Considering the fact that Microsoft had already issued a patch for the Conficker worm as far back as January this year you may stop to ask what all the fuss was about?

Of course people are people so a patch being available in January really doesn’t mean much come the end of March as the majority of average users have no idea how to automatically update their systems, manually find patches or even how to install them once they have them.

If I remember correctly I think I saw a report from Microsoft a while back that stated that almost 1 in 3 Windows users had never updated their system.

Shocking!

Even now the threat of the Conficker worm has not gone away.

I still get a good couple of hundred people reaching my site every day whilst looking for information on Conficker, despite the fact that the publicity around it has almost ground down to nothing right now.

There are probably still around 11 million or more computers out there that have the Conficker worm on them.

The users of those PCs have probably received the fake antivirus warnings it gives out and been given free membership to a botnet but things may not stop there.

Considering the scope of the infection I still fully expect further developments from Conficker in the future as it has enormous potential for all the wrong reasons.

Are you ready for Conficker?

Have you updated your Windows operating system and installed one of the year’s top 10 antivirus programs?

Or do you think that the worm has turned and run away, leaving a lot of people fussing over nothing?

Instead, this is about Terminator2009, a fake antivirus program.

If you come across it and run it then Terminator2009 will simulate a real-time scan on your system, even prior to you actually clicking the scan button!

Surprisingly, perhaps, it will report back that you are indeed infected with some kind of malware.

The catch, though, is that it will tell users they are infected with malware even when they aren’t.

Conveniently, Terminator2009 will then redirect you to a web page where you can buy a premium version of the fake antivirus software in order to remove the malware from your system.

If you don’t ‘upgrade’ then the scanner will keep flashing warnings to alert you of the pressing need to do so.

In reality this fake program has been designed purely to line the pockets of it’s creators who are no doubt getting rich from those who are easily scared into buying their fake antivirus program.