Several of the defendants have been convicted of stealing dead people’s identities to cover up their status as illegal immigrants, military deserters or convicted drunken drivers, federal officials said.

Between July 2005 and August of this year, 112 people were charged in federal court as part of the investigation, which federal officials called “Operation Deathmatch.” Authorities seized $650,000 in cash, a Mercedes-Benz, three guns and more than 80 of the fraudulent passports.

For more case studies, read the article in the SF Gate (online version of the Chronicle).

Ten days before VMworld and VMware still can’t get good press. First their CEO, Diane Greene, gets ousted, then a high-profile licensing bug is found and now the Director of R&D, Richard Sarwal, leaves his $1.25 million salary after just 7 months. (Note to self: get into R&D) It will be interesting to take the pulse of the VMware community at the show and in person. And in the meantime, Microsoft Hyper-V comes out of the gate with customers already touting its benefits.

The hypervisor is the “new” operating system. If you didn’t think that before, take a look at Red Hat’s purchase of Qumranet for $107 million. With Qumranet, Red Hat gets KVM, described by CTO Brian Stevens as an extension to the Linux kernel that allows it to be used as a bare-metal hypervisor, running directly on the underlying hardware and hosting guest operating systems. But according to Brian Madden, the “press” around the purchase is all focusing on the not-so-interesting part. Along with KVM, the SolidICE product includes Spice, a remote display protocol for VDI.

I wonder if this will be like Symantec buying Altiris or Microsoft buying Softricity, where the portion that we care about sort of loses focus as The Borg concentrates on the parts of the acquired technology that are more relevant to them?

(I’m a sucker for quotes that reference The Borg)

Network World publishes “10 open source companies to watch”. On the list, Qumranet!

Also on the list: Kickfire, Marketcetera, Vyatta, Sonatype, Untangle, XAware, SnapLogic, Acquia and Openmoko. What’s best about the list: Matt Asay gives it a thumbs up.

In addition to the above services, KBank offers a service that permits users to receive an SMS message that details any change in account balance and/or point-of-sale (POS) transaction with your debit card.   I really like this service and the feeling of security knowing when, where and by how much my balance changes or my debit card is used in a transaction.    The KBank POS SMS notification is so fast that when I present my card to a merchant I normally receive an SMS message detailing the transaction before the merchant returns for my signature.  (There is an unfortunate lag in the balance change notification that can run minutes to hours behind real-time, but the POS VISA debit card notification is real-time).

As the story goes,  I should have been using my KBank card and account a few weeks ago and not my US-based VISA debit dard.  Why?

My US-based VISA debit card was cloned sometime on or before August 8th.   I am really careful with this card, so I was surprised the magnetic strip was cloned at a POS merchant.   The fraudster made 7 fraudulent transactions beginning on August 8th for a total of around $2500 USD, mostly on August 11th, before I discovered the fraudulent transactions viewing my account on-line.

This would not have happened with KBank SMS-based transaction notification services.

The first transaction with my cloned VISA debit card was less than $50 USD (I assume the fraudster was “testing the water”).   If I was using my KBank card, I would have received an immediate SMS message detailing a POS transaction in Bangkok when I was physically far away from Bangkok in Chiang Mai.   I could have immediately called the bank (or logged in) and blocked the debit card, limiting potential losses to the bank or the merchant to one fraudulent transaction, not seven.

In addition, KBank offers what they call a Web-Shopping VISA card, where you can go into your on-line account (verified by SMS OTP as mentioned) and request a VISA debit card number (with expiration date, CCV etc).   You set the limit from 0 to 500,000 THB (Thai Baht) per day; and you can login to your account and change this anytime (authenticating your transaction with another SMS-based OTP). You can also block or cancel this number anytime and apply for another one.

I am amazed that in Thailand I receive much better anti-fraud prevention and detection services than with banks in the US.   I know of no bank or brokerage in the US that offers the same quality of service and security as KBank in Thailand.