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With how advanced technology has gotten, your personal information doesn’t only live on official documents or personal files—it all exists somewhere online. And most of the time, it’s easier for strangers to find than you’d expect. In fact, in 2025, a record 279 million people were affected by data compromises, according to a report by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC).

Even with just your name and the city you’re in, anyone can uncover details about your background, lifestyle, and even your finances. While all of that can be used for legitimate purposes, like background checks for jobs, for example, your information can also become an opportunity for scammers, identity thieves, and data brokers.

PeopleFinders explains what information is publicly accessible, how it can be misused, and what you can do to protect yourself from potential scams.

Modern Scammers Adopt Modern Tactics — Can You Keep Up?

In the past, people scammed their way in through emails. Today, fraudsters use publicly available data and advanced tools, such as artificial intelligence, to personalize their crimes.

Americans alone have lost over $10 billion to fraud in 2023, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a 14% increase from the year prior. With the newfound openness for data, scammers can easily impersonate you. The more personal details a scammer has, the more believable—and dangerous—their techniques become.

What’s In a Name? What Strangers Can Learn From Yours

The unsettling truth is that many people have little to no idea how visible their private information is — or how easily that information can be weaponized. Your name alone can unlock a detailed snapshot of your life, including the following:

Home Address (Past and Present)

Public records and data broker listings often reveal where you live and where you’ve lived before. All this information can be used to impersonate you, answer security questions, or target your home for fraud or theft.

Family, Friends, and Close Connections

Many databases can also link you to relatives, roommates, or even past partners. Scammers can absolutely use this to pose as your loved ones, reference real people to build your trust, just to break it. They can use it to blackmail, manipulate, or potentially victimize you.

Phone Number and Email

Once your contact info is out in the open, you’re automatically vulnerable to phishing messages, spam, and spoofing attacks designed to extract money or personal data.

Job and Professional History

Employment details can help scammers craft emails that look like they’re coming from your boss, coworker, or HR department. They make fraud easy and legitimate.

Legal Records

Whether you’ve got court filings, bankrup

By Jeanne Sahadi, CNN

(CNN) — The surge of federal immigration agents in Minnesota over the past few months left many people not only traumatized but financially hard up.

People lost income because they were too afraid to go to work or their breadwinner was taken by agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Patrol. Small business owners, in turn, lost revenue because their workers and customers didn’t show up.

In Minneapolis alone, the city government now estimates 76,000 residents – or about 20% of the city’s population – have urgent needs in terms of lost wages, food insecurity and an inability to make rent, among other things.

Mutual aid helps provide a lifeline

Mutual aid groups of volunteers have mobilized to help neighbors sheltering at home with life’s essentials.

Such groups are not nonprofits and are not formally organized. Instead they offer peer-to-peer assistance, which is faster and more agile than a nonprofit or foundation in providing tangible, targeted emergency relief.

“They can move the fastest because they’re volunteer-run and hear directly from neighbors who need assistance,” said Rachel Sayre, director of emergency management for Minneapolis.

Sayre said her neighborhood association effectively has been providing mutual aid to the most vulnerable in their community.

There are too many such mutual aid groups to count.

StandWithMinnesota.com, a site that was stood up a week after Renee Good was killed by ICE agents, aims to be one centralized resource for people who want to help by listing mutual aid groups, crowdfunding campaigns and nonprofits engaged in mutual aid efforts on the ground.

Combined, they’ve raised close to $20 million, according to its creator, former Minnesota resident Ashley Fairbanks. Fairbanks, a communications consultant for nonprofits and a political organizer, has created a new campaign – Keep MN Housed – to help struggling families make their rent and avoid eviction. (In Minneapolis alone, the city government estimates there is nearly $16 million needed in additional rent assistance due to lost household income as a result of the ICE surge.)

Many businesses, meanwhile, have embarked on their own mutual aid efforts. “Every brewery, every café. Everywhere,” Sayre said, noting that shops and restaurants let customers and passers-by know they were collecting specific goods on specific days to distribute to those who needed them.

And some nonprofits have engaged in providing their own direct, in-kind assistance. The Hmong American Partnership (HAP), for example, normally serves as a microlender to Hmong, Southeast Asian and immigrant refugee entrepreneurs and helps provide housing, workforce and community opportunities in the greater Twin Cities area.

During the surge, ICE set up shop in its parking lot, which is located near many of the group’s constituents, said May yer Thao, HAP’s president.

So her organization pivoted.

It decided to use some of its own budget to provide emergency grants of between $2,500 and $5,000 to owners of brick-and-mortar businesses. The money could be used to make rent, pay an employee or get needed supplies. It’s not a lot, Thao said. But, she added, “We hope it will keep them afloat for a month.”

Separately, she said, HAP used a $50,000 grant it received from the Immigrant Rapid Response Fund – which is housed at the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota and run in concert with a diverse coalition of philanthropic leaders in the state – to provide families with boxes of “es

By Georgiana Ralphs, CNN

(CNN) — From the shorelines of Perth in southwestern Australia, a towering blue hill can be seen jutting out of the horizon. Some days it seems so close you could touch it. Other days it’s hidden by mist or passing ships.

“Sometimes it wants to be seen and sometimes it wants to hide in the shadows,” says Glen Stasiuk, lecturer at Murdoch University and director of the 2014 documentary “Wadjemup: Black Prison — White Playground.” “It’s this entity. It has a heartbeat.”

Rottnest Island, or Wadjemup, as it’s known by the local Aboriginal Noongar people, lies 19 kilometers (11.8 miles) off the coast of Fremantle. More than 800,000 people visit each year to enjoy its white sand beaches, crystal-clear waters, and native quokka: an adorable, Instagram-famous marsupial that smiles in selfies.

It’s a spiritual place for Wadjemup’s traditional custodians, explains Len Collard, emeritus professor at the University of Western Australia and Noongar Elder. “In the Noongar story,” he says, “when people die, their spirit leaves their body and travels out west to the islands, to the place of ghosts.”

“Wadjemup was always an abode of the spirits,” Collard explains, “but it definitely became a more spiritual place after the colonial regime, after it became the site of Australia’s largest number of Aboriginal deaths in custody.”

Wadjemup as Aboriginal prison

Aboriginal Australians are one of the oldest continuous civilizations on the planet, having been the custodians of the Australian land, seas and skies, or “Country” as they call it, for at least 65,000 years. Britain claimed the east of Australia in 1770 and its First Fleet of largely convict settlers arrived in 1788. During the colonial period that followed, violent conflicts broke out between the local Aboriginal people and the British.

Wadjemup became a prison for Aboriginal boys and men in 1838. The first prisoners arrived by boat, sleeping in a coastal cave as they mined limestone and built the prison itself.

The majority of inmates were accused of stealing livestock or flour rations, says Stasiuk. He explains that the system was already “completely foreign” to the men and boys, who were charged, arrested and sentenced in a language they didn’t understand. Suddenly, they found themselves sent away to an island, unsure if or when they would see their loved ones again.

Some inmates travelled long and traumatizing distances, including from the Kimberley, an Outback region more than 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles) away. Stasiuk says those from the desert had never even seen the sea. In a practice not uncommon for the time, according to Collard, many were transported while enchained by the neck, arms and legs.

Once on Wadjemup, prisoners were forced into harsh labor as they mined materials and constructed the island’s infrastructure. “The jetty, the cottages, the prison, the governor’s house,” says Stasiuk, “all this was built by Aboriginal prisoners.” Collard says this construction helped the colony justify its expense in setting up the prison, as the Aboriginal people could be further used as cheap labor on future projects after leaving the island.

Life in their cells was no easier, and the prison was overcrowded and rife with disease. These brutal conditions were worsened at the hands of Henry Vincent, one particularly “barbaric” superintendent, according to Stasiuk. “Vincent had one eye and came from the Napoleonic wars,” he explains. “He would chain men up in their cells, beat

Por Hanna Park y Sandra Gonzalez, CNN

Robert Carradine, el actor conocido por sus papeles en “The Long Riders,” “Revenge of the Nerds” y la serie de televisión “Lizzie McGuire,” falleció a los 71 años, según informó su empresa de representación.

“Es con profunda tristeza que debemos compartir que nuestro querido padre, abuelo, tío y hermano Robert Carradine ha fallecido,” dijo la familia en un comunicado a Deadline.

“En un mundo que puede parecer tan oscuro, Bobby siempre fue un faro de luz para todos los que le rodeaban. Estamos desolados por la pérdida de esta hermosa alma y queremos reconocer la valiente lucha de Bobby contra su batalla de casi dos décadas con el trastorno bipolar”, decía el comunicado familiar.

“Esperamos que su camino pueda servir para arrojar luz y fomentar que se enfrente el estigma que acompaña a las enfermedades mentales”, añadió.

Keith Carradine, hermano de Robert, dijo a Deadline que la familia quería compartir la lucha de su hermano con el trastorno bipolar, afirmando: “Queremos que la gente lo sepa, y no hay vergüenza en ello”.

“Es una enfermedad que pudo más que él, y quiero celebrarlo por su lucha contra ella, y celebrar su hermosa alma,” dijo. “Era profundamente talentoso, y lo extrañaremos todos los días.”

Nacido el 24 de marzo de 1954, Robert Carradine fue hijo de John Carradine (1906-1988), el gran actor de caracter que participó en películas de John Ford, como “Stagecoach” (1939) y “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940) antes de especializarse en películas de horror.

Los hijos del veterano John Carradine también siguieron los pasos de su padre y se hicieron actores. Además de Robert, la dinastía familiar incluyó a David Carradine “Kung Fu”, “Kill Bill”) y Keith Carradine (“Nashville”, “Pretty Baby” y las series “Deadwood” y “Fargo”, entre otras), quien ganó el premio Oscar en 1976 a mejor canción original por “I’m Easy” de la película “Nashville”.

Otro hermano del actor, Christopher Carradine, fue exvicepresidente de Walt Disney Imagineering, la empresa que diseña las actracciones de los parques temáticos Disney.

Los tres hermanos Carradine trabajaron juntos en el western “The Long Riders” (1980), en el que interpretaron a los hermanos Younger. De hecho, todos los personajes que eran hermanos en la películas fueron interpretados por actores hermanos en la vida real.

Dentro del género western se ubicó uno de los primeros éxitos en el cine de Robert Carradine, con apenas 18 años: “The Cowboys” (1972), protagonizada por John Wayne. El canal de YouTube A Word on Westerns, especializado en este género de películas, entrevistó a Robert Carradine en 2022, quien contó anécdotas del rodaje.

Pero Carradine alcanzó su mayor popularidad por su papel de Lewis Skolnick, el líder idealista de una fraternidad de inadaptados sociales, en la película de 1984 “Revenge of the Nerds”, una comedia de estudio que generó varias secuelas.

Dos décadas después, encontró una nueva generación de admiradores al interpretar a Sam McGuire en la popular serie de televisión de Disney, “Lizzie McGuire” (2001-2004) y en la p

By Elisabeth Buchwald, CNN

(CNN) — The government is on the hook to refund $134 billion – and counting – worth of tariff revenue collected from President Donald Trump’s most sweeping tariffs, which were rendered illegal by the Supreme Court last week.

How much of that will consumers, who paid for steep tariffs via higher prices, get back?

Almost certainly nothing.

That’s because consumers paid for tariffs indirectly: They’re mostly not the ones making the actual payment to the government. When – and perhaps if – any funds are returned, they’ll go to what’s known as the importer of record, i.e., the party that paid the initial tariff bill. Think: Costco, Walmart, Target, etc.

For now, refunds are largely theoretical. The Trump administration and the Supreme Court have given little clarity about how they would be processed. The only thing you can be sure of is that it will be a lengthy process, with Trump telling reporters on Friday that it could take up to five years to accomplish.

What you paid

Businesses ate the bulk of the tariff cost themselves. But they passed some of that expense on to you. Consumers covered around a one-quarter of their tariff bills through higher prices charged, according to research published by the Harvard Business School’s Pricing Lab.

In total, the Tax Foundation estimates tariffs increased the average American household’s tax payments by $1,000 last year.

Facing pressure from voters to improve affordability, the Trump administration has for months been floating $2,000 tariff rebate checks to help defray the cost of tariffs borne by consumers.

Those rebate checks, which would require approval from Congress, would not be refunds on tariff payments – they’re effectively stimulus checks to help boost the economy that’s been harmed by the higher border taxes. It’s not clear if the Supreme Court’s decision jeopardized those potential rebate checks.

What is clear: The vast majority of consumers haven’t paid tariff costs directly, so the Trump administration doesn’t owe them tariff refunds.

Businesses probably won’t pay you back, either

Costco is one of the thousands of businesses that sued the US government ahead of the Supreme Court verdict, in an effort to secure a refund. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent mused in an interview last month that Costco’s customers likely wouldn’t see a cent of any potential refunds the company gets. Regardless, more companies are likely to follow Costco’s example, with FedEx on Monday filing a case against the Trump administration, marking the first major corporation to do so after the Supreme Court ruling.

Nothing prevents businesses from doling out a portion of refunds they secure to customers. But given they probably would have paid handsome legal fees to get them and that they shouldered the majority of the tariff costs, it’s more or less a pipe dream.

Consumers may see relief in other forms, though.

While David Suk, CEO of The Baby’s Brew, a portable baby bottle warmer, is skeptical he’ll see any amount of the $80,000 in tariff payments his company made since Trump’s sweeping tariffs took effect last year, in the event he does, he plans to lower prices.

If he gets any money back, it wouldn’t represent the overall cost of tariffs, since that also includes substantial front-loading he did to get ahead of tariffs and