I don’t get a lot of meaningful paper mail any more. It’s almost all junk mail. I thought this was the case with a Rogers’ envelope, but for some reason I opened it anyway. It turned out to be a bill for $6668.49. That got my attention. It turned out to be a bill for a Rogers Wireless account. Flipping through the pages trying to figure out what was going on, my eye was drawn to a green box telling me “You saved $0.32 on your Wireless services this bill.” I was thinking I’d better save a lot more than that. My first hope was that this was a bogus bill not sent by Rogers. But everything appeared legitimate. The web address and telephone numbers were all authentic. So, I called Rogers Wireless to see what was going on. A helpful woman named Cynthia confirmed that this really was a bill from Rogers. She then confirmed that none of the information used to set up the account matched my information except for my name and address. So, she knew this was fraud. It turned out...

Graham McWaters and Gary Ford work for financial institutions and are writers and public speakers on financial matters. This is a review of their book, “The Canadian Guide to Protecting Yourself from Identity Theft and Other Fraud,” published by Insomniac Press. Although there is some focus on Canada, much of the material is relevant in the US as well. This book is a useful guide to the different types of fraud that people need to understand and avoid. The authors do a good job of personalizing the material with victim stories. Some types of fraud covered are debit and credit-card fraud, gathering personal information from computers on the internet, real-estate fraud, investment scams, and telephone-based scams. A frequent problem with personal finance and investment books (and self-help books in general) is repetitiveness. It’s not unusual for a book to have only 20 pages of real content repeated in multiple ways to produce a 200-page book. This book is better than most, but is ...