Posted on 01/14/2007 8:03:39 PM PST by Criminal Number 18F
Cases of online investment account hacking are on the rise.
All it takes is a few keystrokes to wipe out an online investment account, and victims often have little or no recourse.
Now the government agency that oversees brokerages is warning investors to protect themselves.
Just imagine saving your whole life for retirement only to have it vanish. Online investment accounts are the new target of choice for some criminals who wipe out entire accounts sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars with just a few clicks.
Bob Sullivan from msnbc.com says the perps are getting smarter, "Criminals have upped the ante quite a bit and now they're going after these big retirement accounts."
(Excerpt) Read more at 14wfie.com ...
Their is one way for consumers to benifit from this system. If you find a "new, small, competent, friendly bank", buy stock in it if possible. It WILL be taken over by US Bank, or another equally repugnant uber bank.
Why does the keyboard need to be protected?
My small bank, the National Grand Bank of Marblehead, Mass., has turned down those offers. I banked with them when I had beer money and when I had millions of my own and corporate money, and got the same good service.
For reasons known but to the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, I could never set up DirectPay to go there, and so I opened a second account at another small bank. I also opened a credit card through a professional organisation of mine... both accounts wound up in the grasp of Bank of America, whose customer service policy can be boiled down to, "**** you."
AT 0820 EDT the website was alive again... it came back up some time during my six hours of downtime. It looks like the site had a graphical redesign. I used netcraft to check what it was running... and netcraft couldn't get an answer because the site apparently borked again.
I bet there are some real tired admins at BoA right now. (BTDT).
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Or, you could use Norton Password Manager or something similar.
You can also have 2 pc's. They are cheap. Use one for online transactions that never does anything but that and the other for general web browsing.
"I was just in my Bank of America account. "
What a coincidence, I was just in your Bank of America account, too.
::rimshot::
I had my account at Security Pacific Bank, specifically to avoid B of A. Along came B of A and snapped it up. So I moved elsewhere, except for a little tiny IRA I left with them. Closed the IRA last week, and they charged me a 30 buck maintenance charge for 06, another 30 buck maintenance charge for the five business days of 07, and another fifty bucks to write the check. All told, it cost me a year's interest to move the account, and.. you know something? It was worth every penny.
Yep. Bank of America's customer service really sucks, but they make up for it by being a lousy value proposition.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
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