Red flags while job hunting Unemployed and feeling desperate? This is no time to drop your guard and inadvertently expose your personal data to identity thieves posing as potential employers. Plenty of con artists are lurking around seeking personal information that they can steal—or, in a case that the Virginia Attorney General’s Office is pursuing against Virginia Employment Services Inc. of Norfolk, guaranteeing people a job in exchange for an upfront fee, typically $365, and then failing to find them employment.

For the third time, the Federal Trade Commission has put off the enforcement date for so-called “red flag” rules that require businesses to adopt plans to prevent identify theft. The agency had been scheduled to begin enforcing the rules starting tomorrow, but it announced Wednesday that it would delay the effective date until Nov. 1 in order to better educate businesses about the rules.

A $150 billion industry used by investors to defer taxes on the sale of investment property is unregulated. Efforts to change that on a federal level have gone unheeded. The trade organization Federation of Exchange Accommodators petitioned the Federal Trade Commission in August 2007 to come up with registration and certification standards for the industry after a company in New York left more than 577 customers out of $132 million they had invested.