Brady over at Techno-Squirrels had a post about Banks and Phishing in relation to an article at wired. I thought I would throw my $.02 into the fray…
It’s completely true that it will get worse before it gets better. The idea is that the future society will become more and more dependant upon digital technology and eventually, ditital crime must be dealt with in much the same way as physical crime.
I also have a bit of an insider on the banks stance which is that they of course would like to prevent it as it causes problems with their moneyholders. Nobody likes their customers getting cheated, but some of the bigger banks will gladly eat the cost, simply because there is in some cases nothing that they can do. They cannot monitor all of their customers emails, and phishing is most prevailant in email. It’s a very fine line. Do they stop any suspicious transactions and risk having the customer mad at them for stopping a legitimate transaction? Do they not stop them all and have a phishing scam go through?
Bottom line is this. Those of us who are more digital savvy than the next shouldn’t have any big problem because we can generally spot a phishing scam. Its the older generations who are not as digital savvy(or at all) that need to take a proactive stance on this. They wouldn’t wander down a back alley when they know there are pickpockets and muggers down it. Educating the people who are generally targets for these scams should be first and foremost before we start blaming banks or anyone else.
About Shane Ede
I beg to differ… I know smaller banks actually do care and would like to do something about it. Unfortunately it’s large banks (IE: USbank, Wellsfargo, and Paypal if you could call them a bank) that have probably 65% of the customers.) I’m not suggesting banks filter email for people or anything else. I’m suggesting that they actually educate their customers about phishing. I’ve never gotten a single email from wells fargo saying a thing about phishing. As far as I’ve seen they don’t really even have an obvious link on their website about it either.
It’s large banks that need to step up to the plate. Smaller banks aren’t usually targets of phishing at this point as it’s much easier to replicate and send out an email calling for wellsfargo customers to “update their information” and randomly hit wellsfargo customers half the time.
We live in a world where companies are expected to take responsibility for their customers lack of knowledge/information. McDonalds didn’t used to write “Danger Contents are hot” on their cups until a supposedly uninformed lady burned herself on it. It’s unfortunate but companies sometimes have to treat their customers like they live in a vacuum if they don’t want to get sued.
Anyways I think the main point I was trying to get at was that banks should be the one to educate customers not the government and they should be the ones spending R&D money on developing applications customers could run to detect phishing emails/prevent them from clicking on false links in emails.
I just wanted you to know that when I say banks I’m talking about the giant non-personal sprawling uncaring nationalized banks as they are the ones that have done the absolute least as they care more about things like large investments and stock/shareholders then customers.
Could this all not be fixed if anytime an online transaction is made it require confirmation through the account owners email an email that has to be on file and only the owner of the account should have access This might not stop 100% of the scams but it would make it that much more difficult to lose your money
ok example old lady recieves phishing email she gives up her bank info
phisher tries to steal money old lady recieves another email this one saying are you sure you would like to transfer all your money out of your account to phishers account
Or to make it more secure make them signup for online service and they have to confirm by Snail Main or in Person at a Branch when doing this they give you an email from there bank for confirming any trancactions
so new deal phisher tries to make a withdraw email with confirm gets sent to your secret bank email the bank email sends you a message to your normal email, saying you have recieved an email in your bank email
just an idea it just makes it all that much harder for someone to rob you a pain for people that make alot of online transactions but hey to be safe I think it is probably worth it