Phishers catch on to the Net's 'long tail'

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Sloppy business practices invite phishing

It's no wonder that such a high percentage of phishing scams involve financial institutions: Banks are notorious for being sloppy in their application of technology. From the 1990s, when their so-called "reciprocal agreements" that would have been physically impossible to actually deploy were touted as though they were viable disaster recovery plans, to today's banks allowing anyone with access to ACH transactions to debit their customers' accounts, banks are long-time subscribers to the 'wink-wink, nod-nod' school of IT security.

I was recently told in no uncertain terms that my bank could NOT prevent ACH transactions from AOL from being posted to my account, even though AOL had no authorization from me to do so (the charges were to pay for some guy's AOL account who I've never heard of - I guess that if he were dumb enough to use AOL, he's probably too dumb to know his actual bank account number, so this was probably a case of human error rather than fraud - but the bank still refuses to refund three months of erroneous AOL charges because "our policy is to refund charges only for the past 60 days"). Now my new bank - Comerica - is telling me that they CAN in fact set up my business account so that I can approve/deny ACH transactions, but that I'll have to pay a hefty service fee in order to get that "service." Banking is out of control, and the phishers know that all too well...

Posted by: jsm555   Posted on: 09/14/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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