Door-to-Door Alarm Salespeople May Be Scammers

If you live in Shasta or Butte County you must read this immediately!

Sheriffs in Shasta and Butte County are reporting that a number of scam artists have been ripping off residents in Redding and surrounding cities.

Posing as door-to-door salespeople or representatives of existing alarm companies, the scammers convince people to pay for “upgrades” to their services. These often expensive upgrades are actually simply a transfer of account to the scammer’s company and results in huge undisclosed fees.

Authorities are looking into the crime and Redding has opened the case number 10-42318. If you are suspicious that someone may be attempting to scam you, calmly collect their information and contact the Sheriff’s Office at 530-538-7321 or the Redding Police Department at 530-225-4200.

How to Protect Yourself

Not all door-to-door salespeople are scammers and it’s important that you can tell the difference between a legitimate representative of your alarm company and a phony.

Here is how you can tell the difference:

• Ask For A License – All alarm company employees are required by law to have an Alarm Company Employee (ACE) license. This means that they have undergone a complete Department of Justice background check, fingerprint scan, and are required to follow a strict set of operating procedures. If you are approached by someone that does not have their license with them, it’s a good bet that they are a scammer.

• Research Their Company – If you are buying a new system, research the company the company the salesperson works for before buying anything. Check out their website and make sure that they are legitimate. Never be pressured into buying an alarm system without first doing the proper research.

• Examine The Salesperson – Are they wearing the uniform from the company they claim to work for? Do they claim to be from Honeywell or GE (alarm manufacturers) instead of the actual company you have security services with? If you have any reason to doubt their credentials, contact your security company directly and ask about the person you talked to.

Don’t risk getting scammed. Immediately report any suspicious contact with door-to-door alarm salespeople to police and help protect your neighbors from these criminals.

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8 Tips to Protect Your Identity Online

In this day and age, almost everyone is using the internet to shop, pay bills, keep up with friends, and more. The internet can be a powerful tool to help simplify your life. However, your life can turn into a complicated nightmare if you aren’t careful to protect your identity online. We’ve put together a few tips to help you stay safe while you’re surfing.

1. Don’t Volunteer Information – When you’re filling out a form online, only give out the information that is required. The less information that you put online, the less that someone can steal from you. And if the form you are filling out isn’t important, sometimes it’s okay to give a less than truthful answer to the form questions.
2. Look For the Lock – Whenever you are giving out personal information on the web, make sure that the page you are on is secure. Look for the lock symbol in your browser’s status bar or “https” in the web address. This ensures that the form you are filling out is sending your online data in a secure manner. Remember, all web addresses generally start out with “http” but a secure page will start out as “https”.
3. Don’t Feed the Phish – If you receive an email from your bank or financial institution, do not click on the links in the email. Go directly to their website to login. Even if the address that the email came from looks legitimate, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Most occurrences of identity theft happen because the victim gave out their own information by accident.
4. Shop Safely – Check with your credit card company or financial institution to see what types of online shopping products they may have available. Some credit card companies offer “one-shot” credit card numbers. These are numbers that your company may issue you to do online shopping – they’re used once only. You can shop safely without the worry that someone may steal your card number.
5. Educate Your Kids – You can take every precaution for safe online activity but if you don’t teach your kids about online safety, they can inadvertently give out important information. Make sure that they understand not to send identifying information about their family or themselves online. Even if they are sending the information to a trusted person, their transmissions could be intercepted.
6. Look Over Your Shoulder – When using your computer in a public area, make sure that you are aware of your surroundings. People can look over your shoulder and watch you enter passwords or PIN numbers that would allow them access to your private information.
7. What’s Their Policy? – Make sure that, when you are shopping online, paying a bill, or participating in any activity where you will be engaging in a funds transfer, that the website you are on has a privacy policy. Make sure that you review it before giving out your financial information.
8. Use a Smart Password – We mentioned earlier that a lot of online identity theft occurs because people accidentally give out their information. This can be true of passwords too. Most “hacking” is actually just lucky guessing so, when you are picking passwords for your online accounts, be smart about it. Don’t use a password that is easily guessed (like a pet or child’s name.) Use as many characters as you can and, if allowed, add in numbers or special characters to make your password hard to guess.

Keeping your identity safe online can seem very daunting. However, by following a few easy guidelines and adding in a good dose of common sense, the internet can be a fun and enjoyable place for your entire family.

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Keep Your Children Safe Around the Pool

Now that summer is here, your family may be doing a lot more swimming. Swimming can be a fun activity for everyone but pools can be dangerous places for children unless you are prepared. Here are some tips to help you keep your child safe around the pool:

• Never leave your children alone in or near the pool.
• Instruct child care providers about the safety hazards for children around pools and emphasize that children must be supervised in or around the pool at all times.
• Make sure that you can reach out and touch any child under five at all times while swimming.
• Install a fence around your pool. Your fence should be at least four feet tall on all four sides. You should also install self-closing and self-latching gates. Make sure that all latches are out of your child’s reach. Most drownings with children occur because they wander out to a pool and fall in.
• Keep rescue equipment near the pool such as a shepherd’s hook or a life preserver. You should also have a phone close by.
• Remove steps to above-ground pools when not in use. However, this is not a substitute for a fence.
• Learn CPR
• Place outdoor furniture away from the pool area so that children may not use them to climb inside of the fence and fall into the pool.
• Use an approved life vest, not air-filled swimming aids.
• Make sure that you have a clear view of the pool from your house.
• Use a float-line across the pool to mark where the deep end begins.
• Teach your children about good pool safety habits and make sure they understand that running, pushing others, diving or jumping into shallow waters, and “dunking” are all dangerous activities.
• Be sure to remove all toys out of the pool once you are finished swimming so that children are not tempted to go in after them.
• Remember, even if your child knows how to swim, that does not mean that he or she is safe around water.

Following these tips and using a good dose of common sense will help keep your children safe this summer in and around the pool.

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Using Camera Surveillance Systems to Stop Time Clock Fraud

Time clocks are an excellent way to keep track of employee hours and pay them appropriately. Unfortunately, some less than moral employees have found ways to game the system and work far fewer hours than they are paid for.

Not a week goes by that we don’t hear about some clever ploy to get paid for hours that were not actually worked.

In one recent case, two employees would work on alternating days and take turns signing each other in. The company, thinking they were getting two full employees each day, turned out to only be getting half of what they were paying for. It took a full 2 months (and a lot of wasted money) before a manager discovered the scheme and fired the pair!

If your company is using a time clock or other employee sign-in method, it’s important that you take an active role in eliminating this type of behavior. By maintaining a good visible security camera surveillance system, you can catch and punish bad behavior immediately and significantly cut down on employee theft.

Hopefully your employees are totally honest with their hours but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

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How Employees Justify Stealing

As business owners, we like to think about our employees as upstanding, well intentioned people who would never even dream of stealing from us or doing anything that harms the business. For the most part, that’s exactly what happens.

Unfortunately, there are enough bad apples that an estimated billion (that’s billion with a b) dollars is stolen by employees each WEEK!

How can that be possible?

As it turns out, some people are great at finding excuses and justifications for their bad behavior.

Some of the most popular ones we hear are:

• “I deserve a higher paycheck anyways”
• “Everyone else is doing it so why shouldn’t I?”
• “It’s not like anyone is going to miss a few small items”
• “This is payback for all of the bad things the company has done to me”
• “The opportunity is too great to pass up”
• “They don’t have any way to catch me so why not?”
• “Their insurance covers the loss anyways so it’s no big deal”
• “They just pass the price on to the customers so the company isn’t harmed”

Using excuses like these, employees in businesses of every size and industry are stealing from their employers every day. Until you implement measures to stop the theft like security camera surveillance systems, there is little that can be done to prevent it.

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