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For what sounds like a scam if ever there was one, MissingMoney.com appears to be legitimate. The team over at Lifehacker have had a rush of successes listed in their comments after their first post of this service and having tried it myself, I was actually able to find an unclaimed rebate in my name!

I found a record with one of my old addresses and clicked the link they gave me. It led to Washington State's web-based unclaimed funds service.

I had to create an account with Washington state's unclaimed money department, but that was a simple process. There was a point where they ask for a SSN, but they give you the option of providing it offline (which I thought was a nice touch).

Afterward, they asked me to submit any kind of record that shows that I lived at that address (which I did) and it was a done deal. In theory, I should get my money in a while. I will update this page at that time. Of course, if you do this, make sure that you're not providing sensitive documents as proof (I think I sent a bill with account numbers blacked out or such).

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Like Phishing, Vishing entices you with a false e-mail but the difference is that they try to get you to call a phone number where you can be fleeced personally by one of their people.

Even if you think an e-mail is legitimate, never call the number provided. Look it up by some other means such as the phone book or from the given company's actual website.

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The Consumerist has an article about a reader who has taken big companies to small claims court several times to get resolution to his problem. His average cost is about $24 and 45 minutes of time.

See, in all cases, he hasn't even had to go to court: the company calls him up the day before the court date and gives him a settlement. It seems they prefer to do that then pay to fly a company representative who isn't fully versed on all the facts to court.

See the original article for the full story of how he does it.

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Consumeraffairs.com did a study of whether they could locate teen girls on MySpace and the results aren't surprising.

By doing simple searches with no special tools or gimmicks, they were easily able to find profiles of girls that were set to public (meaning anyone could read them) that contained more than enough information to find and contact them or their parents.

Parents need to make sure they're involved and knowledgeable about what their kids are doing online while resisting the temptation to ban kids from the Internet completely.

These guys are scum sucking thieves. Don't give them your money. And I'm not talking just about no-name place, I mean ALL of them. Do not use payday loans, tax refund anticipation loans, or anything similar.

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I've always thought this could be done though I figured it would have to involve a light electric field and a fabric of some kind. Either way, it's going to make it pretty easy for military types to sneak around at night.

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Good. Avoiding credit, reading the fine print, and how not to fall for scams would be a good start.

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From the, "that's freaking brilliant!" department, someone figured out that there's a phone tone that means "vacant circuit", or in layman's terms, there's no phone here. When an automated dialer gets that, they erase the phone number from their records so they don't waste their valuable time and money (as if ours wasn't). So what he did was download the tone from the Internet and put it as the first thing on his answering machine.

As long as you don't belong to a school system or work for someone who uses auto-dialers, this is pretty cool.

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Information about the coming USB 3 format is now available. Of course it's far faster than the previous version (about 10 times as fast), but the important nugget is that the connector is backwards compatible with USB1 and 2. That means that you can plug USB 3 devices into older systems and you can plug your old devices into USB 3 solts. That's pretty cool.

George W. Bush

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I can't remember the last time I heard of a good decision being made in relation to Bush's name, but here's one. The budget will be posted online to save money and ease access by people wanting to browse through the monolithic document.