Money: 'Tis the Season for ID Theft

My phone rang at 3 A.M. the other day. As calls at that hour go, it wasn't so terrible. No one I know had been rushed to the hospital. This was an emergency of another sort: my credit was under attack, and I needed to act fast.

Someone had tried to wire $400 from my MasterCard to an account in Bosnia. The transaction raised red flags at Western Union, which refused the transfer. Still, I was advised to shut down my credit card immediately. I called my bank, which had already taken that step--though not before nearly $2,000 in fraudulent charges had...

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