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Who's Really Responsible In Online Banking Fraud?
TheRealStyro writes "According to this article a Miami businessman is suing a bank because of a fraudulent fund transfer possibly caused by the coreflood virus/trojan. He claims the bank is responsible because the bank failed to protect him from known online banking risks. It is obvious that this guy should have had an anti-virus package active, but shouldn't the bank have questioned such a large transfer to a republic of the former Soviet Union (these republics having gained the unfortunate notoriety of being dens of villainy and hackerdom)?"
I told you not to lock them in a room with computers. This is EXACTLY what I said would happen. *shrugs and walks off*
FuckTheFuckingFuckers.com - Post your th
How could virus software prevent something like this anyway?
That text in bold really caught my attention. How did an editor miss that?
... Slashdot is making a bold new move in its use of story formatting.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
ROFLMAO
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Maybe paypal should be incharge.
Me: Hello paypal someone cracked your systems and stole my balance.
PayPal: Oh really? Tough Titties! *click*
Me: WTF Mate?
What could possibly go wrong?
I went to my bank the other day to see if I could put a hold on all transfers of money coming out of my account with the exception of those going to two (and only two) credit card companies. Specifically I wanted to block all money going OUT to my paypal account (I only use the account to receive funds). They said they were not able to stop companies from transferring money out of my account if they had the proper information to do so.
What the hell?
Why not demand pre-verfication on this sort of thing? Why not give the option to request a phone call confirmation of fund transfers, especially when the funds aren't simply going to Visa or the gas company? Or just allow me to set up a list of comanies/websites that are permitted to transfer funds out of my account. There's no reason the banks can't set this up, it's not very difficult. If anyone knows of a national bank that has an option for something like this, I'd be glad to hear about it.
Bank of America does not.
--
RumorsDaily
I await the "In Soviet Russia, banks overdraft you!" comments.
There are 2 types of people in the world, those who find that stupid binary joke funny, and those who don't.
Shouldn't the front desk question things when a guy wearing a leather jacket, sunglasses and carrying a baseball bat walks past?
these republics having gained the unfortunate notoriety of being dens of villainy and hackerdom
/. or what?).
Wow, two pieces of pure flame BS in one sentence, AND not even in the article text. Worst of all, the author appears to not even know the meaning of the word "hacker" (hello? Is this
Yeah, if $90K were being transferred to the US that would have made it look so much more legitimate than to Latvia (which is, btw, probably the last country I'd think of when someone says "ex-USSR"). Notice that the receipient bank held $70K of those, too.
Have you people ever been to Latvia (the country in question)? It is by no means a country of "villainy and hackerdom", it is a member of the European Union, for God's sake! I sometimes have the feeling that many /. readers are still in the Cold War era with their mindsets. Even the article mentions how Latvia is "known" for its "cybercriminals" (and Latvia, mind you, is a very small country, compared to behemoths like Russia or Ukraine, where the real bulk of "cybercriminals" from the ex-USSR resides).
PS: And, yes, if you're wondering, I come from one of those "notorious" ex-URSS republics (Moldova to be more precise).
Doomie
Hmm.
My bank has advanced security. You get issued with a hardware device (fits on your keyring) that generates one-time-use passwords for you to use to log on.
Further, whenever a transaction occurs on any of your accounts, you immediately receive a text message on your mobile phone. If you didn't authorize the transaction, you can challenge it.
I'm not sure this guy has much of a leg to stand on.
A possible solution: Open a second account. Keep all your money in an account you NEVER give out the details about, and specifically make sure you don't have an overdraft facility on the account you do give out details for. Then you transfer money from the account you keep most your money in only as needed.
might have detected Coreflood. I went to symantec and their AV seems to know about it (and several variants), so in *theory*, it would have been caught/removed.
Coreflood seems to allow remote access, so a *firewall* might have helped.
now, the *real* question: If it was indeed coreflood, did someone (a real person) surf his files looking for account info, did all (most, alot, ect) of his files get downloaded, or did coreflood have enough smarts to look for the account info.
I can't see how this is the fault of his bank except that maybe 'fraud detection' didn't work too well, but I don't know what it looks for. I see idiots like this guy all the time. 'No I don't want to pay for Antiviral, Antispyware, Firewall, Backups, etc'
eric
Access to my computer does not equate to access to my bank. How would this work?
Are we talking keystroke monitors or something?
Synergies are basically awesome, and they're even better when you leverage them. -PA
Over here in Switzerland all banks use a strong authentication scheme to make sure only the owner of an account can get in. My UBS account has a challenge/response system (needs a special calculator and account-specific chipcard). My two other banks use a one-time pad where the same code is only valid for a single login. When the old pad is almost finished they just send a new one.
Simple passwords are just not safe enough on the internet. Unfortunately in the real world the real joe user is just not able to make absolutely sure that no cheating is going on.
The banks should at least take a part of the blame if they are too lazy to implement something safe.
Markus
It seems to me that by allowing a compromised system into their network, the bank can't really claim that it is "not responsible for the loss because no one hacked into its system to initiate the wire transfer." I mean, from everything I've ever read about hacking, 99% of the time compromised middleman systems are used to do the hack, which is exactly what this appears to be to me. The only difference is that this hack attacked a more exposed portion of the network (the customer's system) first.
:-P
Of course, the bank is probably still going to win on this, but that excuse is BS. While I agree that Mr. Lopez should've been running a virus scanner, you'd think that they would flag transactions to Latvia; after all, my bank has prevented me from taking out cash at an ATM for far more trivial amounts just because it was an "unusual transaction." I'd imagine that $90K to Latvia probably qualifies as an unusual transaction.
(Unless, of course, Mr. Lopez is really an illegal arms trader or something.)
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
I believe that this is to facilitate a few things, such as:
* Easier to rollback "Oops, Wrong Account Number" problems.
* Easier to prevent the channelling of money to accounts from pishing victims (rough guess, if destination account is receiving several transfers in 24 hours, then raise red flag).
Of course, the cynical side of me thinks that its just an excuse for the bank to use the money on the short term money market for an extra 24 hours. ;)
Boris.
There is precedent for foreseeability of criminal intervention not cutting off the causal chain between negligence and damages. For instance, a train negligently goes past a girl's stop and she has to walk 1 mile back to the stop as a result. On the way, she gets raped two times. The railroad is liable even though intentional criminal activity intervened, because it was foreseeable that she might get raped walking a mile alone at night along a railroad track.
I didn't read TFA, because I don't have TFT to FDI, so this may or may not be an even remotely plausible analogy to the case here, but it was worth pointing out.
Phoning someone and asking them if they really did make a transfer is not an invasion of privacy as the customer should already know about it, and the bank definitely does.
I've gotten this kind of call before, and I'm glad of it... In my case though, I really had made a withdrawl in one city, then a $2000 interac purchase in annother city 2 hours later, then another interac transaction a few hours later in the first city.
Admittedly, the guy is a moron for using an unsecured PC and whining about getting pwned.
But why don't the banks watch spending patterns? I know the credit card companies do, and have for a while-- about 10 years ago, I had a Mobil gas card. I let my then-girlfriend use it for a while, and a week or so later I got a letter from them about "potentially questionable" charges because the activity was different from what it normally was. I usually top off my tank to get the dollar amount to the nearest $0.25, and my GF didn't. That was enough to trip some alarm on some computer somewhere.
Clearly the computing power and algorithms exist for all financial institutions to do this. I guess the answer to why they don't is because it would cost them money and lower their profits, and what customer losses can't be blamed on the customer will be covered by the gummint-- so why bother?
Also, the man regularly initiated international wire transfers, hence no fraud alert triggered.
The old adage still rings true; a fool and his money are soon parted.
Any online bank that doesnt use offline one-time keys as transaction verification is insecure and vulnerable to client computer hacking.
The technology to solve the problem is available, and many banks use it, so frankly I'd say any bank which does not offer such an option should be held at least partially responsible for losses incurred through lax security policies.
That is quite normal. A few years ago, a friend of mines mother is a Doctor with her own practice. She uses her visa for buisness purchases, mainly large transactions $1000+ and had been doing that for over a year. One time my friend needed some money for gas so his mom just gave him her credit card. He went to safeway, bought gas and then went in to the store and bought some snacks for his trip. The same day, his mother got a phone call form the credit card company asking if she was missing her credit card. They noticed that my friends purchaces were out of pattern and thought that someone stole the card.
When thieves steal a card, they usually make a few small purchases first to test it out before sucking the card dry. Visa was quick to act on this to prevent theft. It is in their best interest to do this. That kind of action is very normal.
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right. --Isaac Asimov
Unfortunately, at my credit union each account held by a particular person is only different by 1 character. So if they've got my escrow account number they can figure out the rest.
Banks take 1 - 2 days to receive funds from other banks received through the Fed. The NSF process gives the other bank an additional 48hrs to stop payment on the check and demand money back. Five days is a reasonable amount of time to protect the bank from losing money that hasn't fully cleared yet.
When Check 21 is fully in place, you are correct. There will be immediate availability of funds.
Many people will be hurt by this, as it removes any buffer that they are used to dealing with for writing checks to pay bills that take several days to clear.
However, the vast majority of check monitary transfers are going to happen through the Federal reserve system or regional clearinghouses for a significant time to come.
Currently, many financial institutions turn your check into an ACH transation. When I pay either of my credit card bills, the check isn't returned to me. It is used as an instrument to authorize an ACH withdrawal from my checking account.
Banks are in business to make money. They don't make money by letting people abuse the time it takes transactions to clear through the Fed or clearinghouses to write bad checks.
If you want your money ASAP, cash the check and then deposit most of the cash. Assuming you are an account holder in good stead, you should have those funds available to you immediately, or utilize direct deposit.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
The electronic payments within the US (possibly CA also) are handled via a system called ACH (automated clearing house). With ACH they could indeed hit your account such as that. But the ability to inject ACH debits usually requires a cooperating bank in the US (who recognizes the organization generating the electronic debits). Typical examples are mortgage payments, insurance companies and PayPal.
For foreign transfers (such as the one talked about here), this most likely happened via SWIFT-wire. With SWIFT-wire I do not believe it is possible to pull money (i.e. via an electronic debit). The transfer has to be pushed from the sender. So my guess would be that the cybercrook here gained access to the computer (owned by the person who lost the 90K) and faked an online transfer request. Maybe the guy has always on DSL or cable and leaves his system powered up 24/7.
At least thats my perception of what happened here. In the case of ACH fraud, I think the FBI could come down hard on the receiving bank, and who ever generated the fraudulant debits. With SWIFT-wire, its a whole different set of rules when crossing national boundries.
This msg is brought to you by the letter 'W'.. for Worthless Wuss
but surely, although not responsible for him being the victim of a virus, they ARE RESPONSIBLE for transferring money that he didn't actually authorize? does the word 'fraud' ring any bells?
His computer was logged in and it sent a transfer request. But he, personally, the person who the account belongs to, didn't actually authorize the transfer. Therefore it's a case of bank fraud by whoever did authorize it, which would boil down to the virus writer.
The bank should put the money back in his account and then track down the criminal type to recoup their costs.
FGD 135
What annoys me the most about these stories is that there's no way for the customer to take proactive measures to disable problematic services. Maybe the default is to enable online banking, but I should have the right to tell them to disable that service and not honor any request through it unless and until I show up at a branch office with appropriate identification.
The worst example of this was a former bank (emphasis on "former") that unilaterally disabled all existing ATM cards without warning. But not to worry - our spanking new debit cards should have already arrived, together with the new PIN number in a separate mailing.
As if that's not bad enough, this was back before debit cards had fraud protection. If somebody cleared out your checking account that was it - that money was gone.
I immediately cancelled my account. The drone assured me that my funds were safe, I could request (REQUEST) a new ATM card, etc. I told him there was no way I was keeping my money there - they violated my trust and they weren't getting a second chance.
I heard, unoffically, that a full third of the bank's customers dropped their accounts because of this braindead move. But the bank's new overlords and masters in Minnesota refused to accept responsibility for a collosial FU - they said the problem was that we were all to provincial to understand the brave new world of banking, not that we were well-informed and refused to do business with assholes who could have left us traveling without access to our funds and without warning. (When I travel I usually pulled spending money out of an ATM so it's in the local currency, but now I'll probably use a "gift card.")
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
It's incidents like this that is leading us towards having to be licenced to write software much like architects and engineers are licensed to practice their trade. We may be another 10-20 years away from that but unless software developers get their act together it's going to come sooner than we all think.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
This kind of thing is easily preventable by issuing a SecureID or SafeWord tag to people. True, it will cost money, but it's comparatively cheap considering the alternatives.
Some banks in Europe have been using SecureID for years. Why don't we use them here?
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
An ATM limits you by preventing the amount you can withdraw from the account (upto 300).
A Wire transfer of 90,000 to a country which is known in Financial circles to be a haven to cybercriminals should have sent up some flags.
Heck, I spent over a grand on a credit card transaction, Discover used to call me up and "harass" me. Why? Because they stand to lose money if its a fraudulent transaction.
Why didnt BOA do the same? Coz it aint their money? Safeguards are only built in when its your ass on the line.
Rapid Nirvana
Basically the latter. FDIC provides insurane up to $1ooM on DEPOSITS! Not authorized debits. And YES, this was an AUTHORIZED transfer from the Bank's standpoint. This guy is at fault for not taking adequate protections to secure his own account.
Should my bank analyse every transaction made on my account...
Why not? Credit card companies do all the time. A couple of years ago, I put an unusual charge on one of my cards while I was out of town. The credit card company tracked me down at my hotel to ask me if I had authorized it, and asked me a couple of random questions about my account to confirm that they really were talking to me.
Credit card companies do this, because they're on the hook for any fraud over 50 bucks. Banks don't, because they're not and its cheaper for them to not take any responsibility.
It's not like this would even be all that expensive for them -- it's all automated, and the software that credit card companies are already using could be easily repurposed for bank accounts.
Until one of you gets burnt.
So what happens when your due diligence isn't enough? What if someone that works at a gas station or a hotel grabs your debit card number and does the Fandango with it?
I guaren-fucking-tee you that someone that has replied to these comments would say, "You deserve it!" and list some explanation why we should take hours a day to protect our bank accounts.
If someone decides to transfer all my funds to a foreign country, that should be a big red flag. Or anytime a large amount is going to be transferred to another account. They should have to get verification from the account holder before high dollar amounts are able to go through.
These people I used to work with both had their CCs stolen by an employee that quit on that day. They had hundreds of dollars racked up by day two, on each card. They went to the police, prosecuted, and their banks didn't hold them accountable for the purchases.
Know how the woman got their CCs? They left their purses on their own desks when they went to the bathroom or went on break. According to some people, they deserved it.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Banks should consider the idea of posting risk assesments to the web page based on the client OS and browser. That is tell the customers that if they run a system that obtains viruses and spyware, they run a much higher risk. Likewise, if they are using a browser and a e-mail client that have known high risks, the client should be told. Obviously, Windows, IE, and Outlook are about as high of risk as it will get. Run something like Mainframe|Unix|BSD|Mac|Linux with lynx, then you have an ultra-low risk.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I find it very odd that the majority of his funds were frozen by another bank. BofA certainly has the muscle internationally to pressure them for release. I'm thinking that something might be fishy about Mr. Lopez's business account. After all, we've all seen the emails and news stories warning us about the popular printer and ink toner scams that abound. I wonder why Mr. Lopez isn't suing the bank that actually has his funds and didn't check the identity of the person on the other end who ordered the transfer and picked up the money?
As far as I can tell from the linked Symatec information the virus turns your computer into a DOS zombie controled over IRS. It doesn't say anything about installing a keystroke logger. The Secret Service investigation is not claiming that the virus was behind the fraudulent transfer. It simply noted the infection as a fact of the investigation.
According to the article Mr. Lopez frequently makes wire transfers (albeit not to Latvia), so I'm not sure why everyone is leaping to the conclusion that this was done by clever cyber criminals and not business associates, customers, or bank employees. It may very well be, but the article contains no evidence to support the claim.
A bank can honestly not tell a customer that they didn't accept the risk of handing out money to thieves like candy, when they marketed their online banking as a feature people can use safely.
Obviously, online banking is not as safe as telephone banking [when not using a portable phone], and no where near as safe as working with a teller in a bank, or an ATM machine. Although now there are examples of ATM machines being hijacked with card readers, and cameras to capture PINs. All a computer needs is a little spyware, and presto, 128bit encryption is rendered useless. And with all the machines that have spyware, it's impossible to promise reliable banking security on the desktop computer.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
If the victim in this case used Microsoft Windows, with all its well-know and well-publicised security flaws, he only has himself to blame.
Supermarkets in the US have credit/debit terminals where the customer swipes the card themselves and often even signs electronically. The card holder's name might appear on the register where the cashier could see it, but they seldom bother to read it, and they prectically never check the card for small purchases.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
But this guy is running a machine where compromises are the status quo. It is a regular occurance. I mean, talk to anyone who has used MS Windows on the internet, and almost all of them have horror stories. And there's even a whole industry of after-the-fact cleanup dedicated to these recurring problems. If, in the face of this reality, you choose to run MS Windows, then aren't you accepting it? For Windows machines to be compromised is not an exception -- it's something you expect to happen from time to time. And this isn't something obscure known only to the 3l33t h4xx0rs of Slashdot. Even the most simple laymen have heard about spyware, the need for virus scanners, etc. I mean, seriously, even your grandmother knows this stuff. (The difference between grandma and the "elite" is that she hasn't made the connection that it's only a Microsoft thing and that she could avoid if she wanted to; she mistakenly believes this situation of insecurity is "normal" for the whole state of personal computing.)
Because of this, I think it's reasonable for a MS Windows user to expect their computer to be used, from time to time, by others without their consent, and with strangers impersonating them. IMHO, that's a bad situation, but apparently other people are ok with it. If they are ok with this and have accepted the situation, then why aren't they responsible for it?
Again, I stress that I'm talking about routine, rather than exceptional, security violations. If someone breaks into your locked car and uses it to commit a crime, it's not your fault. If you paint "steal this car" on the side of your car and you routinely leave it unattended with the doors open and the engine running, day after day, year after year.. then I think you have some explaining to do, when the town drunk takes it.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
What happened to this guy is wire fraud, someone pretended to be him and authorized a wire transfer from his account. Wire transfers are sender iniated only. Nobody can contact bank and take money by wire, you contact the bank and send money by wire.
What you are thinking of with PayPal is direct debit, probably via ACH. This is a US only thing and works differently. It's a network of banks, employers and merchants that is watched over by the federal reserve. Using this yes, someone can pull money from your account. However as per their ACH contract, and federal law, they must have permission to do so. If they don't, you file a fraud complaint and contest it.
Just such a thing happened to my friend. He had been with a hosting company for some time, one with an actual signed contract. When it was up, he cancled it via fax notification. All was fine until a few months later, when they automitaclly withdrew all the cancled months worth of payments. They had a bunch of BS claims about the contract not being cancled and autorenewing and so on. So he contacted his bank and filed a fraud complaint. They put the money back in his acocunt immedatly as a temporary thing while they investigated. He sent them a copy of the contract, and of the letter he sent canceling. After a bit more investigation, the bank decided he was right, made the credit to his account perminant, and went after the hosting company for the money.
So with ACH, there's really very little to worry about. Yes, a company you've never heard of on the network could technically clean out your bank account for no reason. However you'd have the money back in less than 24 hours of filing a complain, and a few months later they'd all be doing time in federal prison.
The reason in this case the bank is refusing to help the guy is because it wasn't ACH, it was a wire transfer. Wire transfers are very different. A wire transfer would be what you do at Western Union: You pay a company to make funds immediatly available to another party of your designation. They company then worries about actually shuffiling funds later, your designee can get the money immediatly. With large ones, it can be done directly bank-bank.
So that's what happened here, someone broke in to his computer, and authorized a wire transfer from his account to another one. From the bank's perspective, they did everything correct. They recieved proper authorization for the transfer and made it. It would not have been iniated had someone with the proper credentials not requested it.
So the bank believes they've done what they should do. That his computer got hacked isn't their problem. Now we'll see if the courts agree.
Beware! My checking account was grossly overdrawn, due to a clerical error in MICR encoding the amount of a check that I has written. Without asking me, Bank of America took the funds from another account of mine to cover the check. I found out about it when I received my next statement. They eventually restored the funds to my accounts. I no longer do business with Bank of America. They let their computers make all the decisions. It was only when I complained that humans got involved.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
"My fellow Americans, I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."
Ronald Reagan, about to go on the air for a radio broadcast, unaware that the microphone was already on
If only... then the poor sod would have all his money. It's a shame you Americans don't have a warmongering President! hehe.
Couldn't stand the weather
> Heck, I spent over a grand on a credit card transaction, Discover used to call me up and "harass" me.
Several years ago, I drove to the states to visit relatives.
When I came back, there was a voice message from Visa waiting for me.
I called them back to ask what the problem was.
Well, somebody (that would be me...) used my credit card to purchase gas in a US gas station and "it did not fit my usage profile".
Couple of years later, we went on vacation to Muskoka.
I wanted to arrange a dog-sled ride for the kids. Problem is, outside the GTAMy Fido cell phone turns into a pumpkin. I'm also out of quarters so I use the Visa card at a pay phone.
Whan I get back, you guessed it, another chat with Visa telling them not to worry, the transaction is legit, "usage patterns" notwithstanding.
Customer protection or privacy invasion?
You decide.
Next, flying abroad to visit relatives.
This time, I call them preemptively. I will be out of country approximately between xxx and yyy, the card will be used in the following countries, don't give me any troubles.
> Why? Because they stand to lose money if its a fraudulent transaction.
Zigackly!
> If you've got a name on the card of "Helga Olafson" and the person using
> it is a 6'9" African-American gentleman, you may want to ask a question or
> two about it.
Maybe it was a transgendered African-Scandinavian, (insert obligatory "you insensitive clod" here).
They'd suspend your account and the accounts of anyone who has ever transferred funds to, or received funds from your account.
What utter nonsense. If Paypal suspended the accounts of everyone who ever interacted with a fradulent account, they would be killing off a lot of perfectly good customers. I have never seen any evidence of any kind that this kind of thing takes place. If they feel another account is closely related (like an alias used by the same person) then they may kill it, but otherwise this would be an insanely stupid thing to do. Some people conducting fradulent activity with Paypal transact with thousands of people before they are caught. In most of these cases the buyers did nothing wrong except by letting themselves be duped. If Paypal killed all of those accounts, their business model would die fairly quickly.
There would be no way to talk to a representative, as they do not publish telephone numbers
If you actually took the time to visit their contact page instead of spewing more uninformed rubbish, you would have found that their contact number is 402-935-2050.
I'm not saying Paypal is without problems. Clearly they have their share. But at least make some kind of minor effort to get your facts straight.
On the whole, east European countries, including Latvia, are notoriously dodgy and a common source of online scams. I've worked with online transaction systems here in Europe that regularly block transactions of any kind to IP's or addreses in these destinations. It's actually quite common (and often used on a 'rating' system to detemine the likelyhood a transaction is fraudulent, much in the same way spam assain works to rate emails as potential SPAM).
Again, that's even here in Europe, because it's quite clear to companies here how much of a problem it is, even if those states are EU members now (a status they were only granted less than a year ago I might add, and they still do not yet have equal status as I recall, in a move to prevent 'brain drain' from people flooding for poorer ex-soviet countries to west block countries).
Searching for 'crime' and 'Latvia' (something I did to help illustrate the point) shows on the first page of results from Google that the US Departement of State has even issued a travel notice for all US citizens going to Latvia. The state.gov web site says amoung other things:
"Internet crime is a growing concern in Latvia. Common fraudulent schemes involve both Internet auction sites and Internet job search sites. In the first scam, criminals offer valuable items for sale at low prices on Internet auctions and request that payment be sent by wire transfer to a bank in Latvia or though a fraudulent escrow site that they have created themselves. In this scheme the money passes through a bank in Latvia and is quickly withdrawn by ATM or transferred to a bank in another country. It is very difficult in these cases to discover the identities of the account holders or recover the funds.
The second common scam involves identity theft through false job offers. In this scheme, a company claiming to be located in Latvia, but which has a non-existent address, offers the victim employment as a U.S.-based agent or freight forwarder. When the victim responds to the job offer, commonly posted on one of several popular internet job sites, a Social Security number and other identifying information - needed for the identity theft - is required under the guise of conducting a background check. ".
Just because it's a small nation, doesn't mean it's not notiously dodgy - it is, and it is known for online fraud as well as quite a few other tyes of crime (people trafficing being another that springs to mind). So as a European I'd have to say I agree with the article and think it's accurate in it's assertion.
I no longer do business with Bank of America. They let their computers make all the decisions. It was only when I complained that humans got involved.
Presume that there are no computers.
Bank of America, upon reciving a check order on their hand-written "drafts out" list, would process it and debit the funds from your assocated accounts in accordance with their standard policy. Until you complained, they would just do this -- because it's what the tellers and pencil-pushers were required to do, by law and contract and policy.
Computers do simple automated tasks easily, and drawing money from an account is a simple automated task.
If you're bitching because your bank used computers to run the math and apply numbers in a given situation -- the very thing they were desinged for! -- then you're on the wrong website.
Try luddites.org.
Unfortunately, Federal law mandates a limit on transfers and some banks have additional policies and charges for electronic transfers, so this is a bit impratical.
I had the pleasure of learning about this bullshit the hard way.
More information here and here. Call your bank for more info.
Preface:
Ever since 9/11/2001, the states have taken
some righteous blame for the ease with which
fraudulent driver's licenses have been issued.
Here in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the DMV
(Dept. of Motor Vehicles) now requires proof
of occupancy in the state before issuing new
driver's licenses.
Tale of BoA Ineptness:
I was surprised to find correspondence from
BoA in my mailbox addressed to a person I do
not know, and who has never lived at my street
address. It appeared to contain a booklet of
either "starter" checks or else a loan payment
book. Within days, a second package arrived
that was just like the first one. I returned
both back to my local US Post Office with the
complaint that the party that the mail was
addressed to did not reside at my home. With
typical USPS aplomb, this mail was re-delivered
to me. (WTF?)
In the same mail, yet another letter from BoA
arrived. By the feel of it, it contained a
credit card, debit card, or ATM card. I wrote
a letter of explanation and complaint and then
mailed the entire lot back to BoA's originating
address. No news back from BoA. Then 2 weeks
later, a CS letter and another "credit/debit/ATM"
card arrived, from Dallas, TX this time instead
of Houston, TX. Again, I wrote a second letter
of explanation and complaint to BoA's 2nd
originating address, along with the new letters
addressed to my phantom room mate. No news
back from BoA -- no letter, email, or phone call.
The next correspondence that I received from
BoA was their CS department in North Carolina.
I sent yet another cover letter to BoA, along
with their latest correspondence. BoA never,
ever tried to contact me (no thanks, let alone
any mere acknowledgement of receipt).
The final letter I received from them came
nearly a month later, also from BoA CS, also
addressed to my phantom room mate. My last
cover letter back with their CS letter was,
shall we say, somewhat rude. Nonetheless,
perhaps it was my rudeness that actually got
some attention from these flaming idiots.
Identity theft has been (IMHO) partially
usurped by "Address Theft" in an attempt
by illegal aliens to establish residency
required to obtain driver's licenses. I would
advise readers of this prose to never leave
mail out for pickup by the postman -- drop
outgoing mail at the post office or postal box.
Also, it wouldn't be a bad idea to purchase
a secure (approved) mailbox for your mail.
Times have changed, and not for the better.
My personal opinion of BoA dropped into the
basement with this exchange of correspondence,
and with BoA's totally clueless behavior. I
wouldn't do business with this bunch of clowns,
ever, any more than I would respond to an urgent
"419" letter from Nigeria.
"So when are all the diehard M$ fans finally going to get the message"
.so libraries on the system in the process. (And don't even get me started about what that means if that app is a copy-protected game _and_ you have an ATI graphics card.)
;)
About the time there will be a real alternative to it.
Fact is, most people aren't really "fans" of any one OS. Noone except the Linux fanboys (been one myself, believe it or not) actually gives a damn about the _OS_. It's like having a flame war about whether brown seat covers are more evil than blue seat covers in a car. It's that stupid.
The OS is just a necessary evil you need to load the _applications_. _That_'s what matters. Most of us could live just as happily without an OS at all, if the apps could be loaded otherwise. No, seriously. The OS is just a necessary evil, no more.
So until Linux actually starts having some more useful apps, it's just not a competitor. It doesn't matter how good the OS is.
So the sad choice really is, do I:
A) get Linux, spend weeks coaking Wine/WineX/CrossoverOffice into running each program. And recompile half the
B) get Linux, spend weeks learning some half-arsed dysfunctional equivalent to even the most common apps, or
C) Get windows.
Took me about two years of messing with Linux (and ranting on newsgroups about how the evil MS will never again see a cent from me) to realize that I was in fact increasingly often giving up and taking route C. Which is to say, booting my Windows partition.
"And I do tend to stay up with security fixes unlike the windows sheeple who's probably running a windows box with a generated serial number"
Ah, the usual "if they don't want Linux for free, they must be running a warezed version of Windows" fallacy. How refreshing. I hadn't read that fallacy in, oh, about two days, and was starting to get withdrawal syndrome
Reality is more complex than that. Even by BSA statistics -- and BSA is _paid_ to cry wolf and exaggerate -- piracy isn't _that_ wide spread in the Western world. The fact is, like it or not, most of us have knowingly paid for Windows.
In my case, I can even tell you why I went back to it. Because, as they say, "Linux is for free only if your time is worth nothing." Dunno about you, but if I put even a minimum wage price on my time, Windows has practically paid for itself by now.
"There's no way in hell a windows box can survive long enough to grab and install all the fixes when its been re-imaged by the distribution cd that came with the machine."
Again, yes, there is. Go to the TCP/IP properties, tell IPSEC to allow only outgoing connections. It's been built in at least since NT 4.0, maybe earlier.
No, it's not a full-featured firewall, but it will keep you safe enough while you download the patches.
And here's the fun part: it takes less time than whining about how Microsoft sucks. Now it may not be as fashionable as whining about MS on Slashdot, but it will keep your computer safe.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I never remember signing anything that authorized the bank to make unauthorized withdrawals from my other accounts in the event that there were insufficient funds to cover a check.
What you're describing is the bank's right of set-off, which I understand most financial institutions claim--it's buried somewhere in the fine print of your account agreement. (Actually, I'm not as familiar with U.S. banking law; is set-off just assumed?) This has been around for a long time; it didn't show up with the invention of computers. (See for example the 1913 case American National Bank of Nashville v. Miller, which refers to this right). They can, at their option, draw upon your other accounts to fulfill unsatisfied debts.
I expected them to bounce the check, or have a human examine it and recognize that the written amount of the check was a tenth of the amount indicated by the MICR.
They may well have believed they were doing you a favour. Rather than bouncing your check and embarrassing you in front of your creditors, they let it through because of your generally good credit behaviour. As for hand rechecking the amounts, someone already saw the physical check once and goofed. It was a human being that misread the amount of your check, not a computer. The electronic bits--the MICR routing to your account and so forth--worked properly. Even if your bank instead waited for all checks to arrive at the local branch for processing, you can still have the clerk who makes a typo/calculating error/other mistake, and you get the added bonus of waiting two weeks for checks to clear.
Banks made numerical errors long before electronic computers. The boardgame Monopoly was first sold in 1935, and it has a "Bank error in your favor" card for a reason.
~Idarubicin