PayThink

A former card-skimming thief has started a legitimate business that relies on other people getting arrested. He posts mug shots scraped from the websites of law enforcement agencies in the state.

Congress has expressed deep concern about the regulatory control of banks, yet at the same time wants banks to aggressively finance business and economic growth.

One court in California says it may be identity theft if a person uses a stolen password to pose as someone else on Facebook.

The dramatic exit of Dominique Strauss-Kahn from the International Monetary Fund and the selection of Christine Lagarde as the fund's new managing director have put the international spotlight on the process by which leadership of international financial bodies is determined.

There are few topics as easy to get into a friendly, if a bit heated, debate these days as "the future of branches" in banking. Many folks quickly compare branches to buggy whip factories and traditional bankers to Luddites. Others jump in and cite research or survey results that say customers still prefer to open accounts in branches, and that, by the way, branches are still profitable.

In a flat-fee model, most of the innovative energy goes into reducing costs rather than developing services that customers value.

There is new evidence against a suspected spokesman for the hacker groups Anonymous and LulzSec: Police say they found 750,000 passwords on his computer.

The proposed Qualified Residential Mortgage rules have a better chance at harming the housing market than they have at addressing underlying weaknesses in the securitization process. They are an overreaction to the excessive risk-taking during the housing boom.

Police attribute a rash of ATM crime to what they call the "Poison Ivy Fraud Ring."

It isn't very often you meet someone whose name is currently on a list of people the Taliban is seeking to kill. And yet one such person shared the story of his work and that of credit unions in Afghanistan.