Just saw a story about how the San Francisco Police Department received a very realistic looking check from a Canadian company and addressed to one Inspector Harry Callahan. You’d be amazed how many people still fall for this scam that has been around for years – someone you’ve never heard of sends you a check out of the blue with an elaborate story – possibly a businessman opening a new office in your country or you’ve just won the lottery.

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Don’t get scammed this holiday season by any of the growing number of work-at-home and part time work opportunities that are probably cropping up in your inbox.

They always seem appear more often around the holidays and one of the most common scams will try to lure you into working part time for a foreign business. It will also likely require either a bank account to process customer payments, or a physical address to receive and forward parcels.

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A hacker-turned-security expert who apparently couldn't resist turning back to the dark side is getting ready to have a very big jail key turn behind him as he faces more than 40 years for a recent (alleged) crime spree.

It's not like 35-year-old Max Ray Butler, AKA Max Vision or Iceman, didn't walk this walk before. In 2001 he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for hacking into the very government computers he was supposed to protect, even while he was working as an FBI informant.

Assumed to have changed his ways when he got out of prison, he seemed to earn a solid reputation as a security researcher who really know what he was doing (for obvious reasons).

Whether he just couldn't handle to boredom of a proper job, missed the excitement and fame of the dark side, or just wanted to make money, Max' Vision was quickly corrected when he was busted selling thousands of stolen credit cards on a web site used by hackers and identity thieves to trade stolen information.

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When TJ Maxx announced that their massive data breach earlier this year would ultimately cost between $3 million and $5 million, I wasn't sure if it was naivety or dishonesty. But nothing near the insanity of the security experts who claimed the real cost would be closer to $1 billion.

Seems like the lunatics really were in charge, because in a recent SEC filing TJ Maxx parent TJX now admits that the costs so far could exceed $150 million, and security experts are sticking by their estimate of $1 billion or more.

And yet despite being accused of letting the biggest and costliest identity theft in history to happen under their very noses, it doesn't seem to worry customers. In the most recent quarter sales were up 9% at TJX. In spite of the ecomonic woes. Go figure!

On a side note authorities seem to be one step closer to the criminal masterminds behind the crime, with the arrest in Turkey of a Ukrainian citizen trading in some of the stolen credit cards.

If you’ve ever received one of those ridiculous Nigerian 419 scams that offer you potentially millions of dollars for helping to move some suspect funds, and wondered why scammers keep sending them, I have your answer. Because they work!

Australian media recently reported how a bunch of 419 scammers from West Africa duped an Australian out of more than $1.7 million by persuading him to pay up-front fees to help win a lucrative business contract.

The contract naturally didn’t exist and authorities in the Netherlands managed to catch the scammers who were part of a large organized crime ring believed to have duped numerous victims out of anywhere between $8,700 and $4 million.

And closer to home, in January of this year a county treasurer in Michigan was arrested for investing more than $1 million in county funds in a 419 scam, even though he had previously been warned of the fraud dangers.

So why do these scams work? For the same two reasons most scams work – because the scams get more creative and believable, and because they rely on a very small percentage of recipients to be foolish enough or greedy enough to fall for the bait.