ReadWriteWeb

Mocality, a Kenya-based crowd-sourced web and mobile business listings company, has accused Google of fraudulently stealing its customers. In a blog post today, Mocality's CEO Stefan Magdalinski maintained that Google has targeted its database, the core of its company, and lied to its users in an attempt to get them to join up with Google Africa's Getting Kenyan Businesses Online (GKBO) program.

Shortly after GKBO began in September, Mocality "started receiving some odd calls" from customers who were confused by pitches to build them websites that came from Google in apparent partnership with Mocality. There was no such partnership and Mocality claimed to discover it was Google lying to its customers to bring them into GKBO.

Google has released a statement which we have included at the end of the article after the jump.

What is the second thing that a company should do when it discovers a data breach with personal information? Call CSIdentity and arrange for its wholesale ID theft protection service. (The first, obviously, is to fix the leak and make sure it doesn't happen again.) The company announced a program called Global ID Protector earlier this month.

Recently, Visa Europe announced a partnership with ValidSoft Limited, a fraud-prevention specialist, to use its VALid authentication platform and VALid-POS solution, in detecting credit card fraud. The ground-breaking feature of the new service is that it uses a mobile phone's location in conjunction with where a Visa credit card is being used to identify, in real-time, possible fraudulent transactions.

Sound familiar? It does to us. It sounds very similar to this solution for U.S. users from Location Labs and Finsphere, announced back in October.

Social networking sites Twitter and Facebook were used in online versions of a classic "pump and dump" stock fraud, netting around $7 million. The fraud was discovered during a cocaine-trafficking probe, said U.S. prosecutors on Tuesday.

The sites were used to "defraud the investing public into purchasing stocks that were being manipulated by participants in the conspiracy," according to a statement by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office.

The latest tool to fight identity theft may already be in your pocket - it's your mobile phone. Using a new solution from Clickatell, a mobile messaging service provider, consumers can be alerted to suspicious bank transactions via text message. The service called Clickatell SMS Receipts notifies banking customers of account activity via SMS alerts. With this real-time information, consumers are instantly able to verify legitimate use of their account or detect fraud.