Is on-line banking safe?

cepheus

Based on the number of digits on my account there is scope for 100 million account numbers and 1 million sort codes, so somehow there should be room for 100 trillion combinations or 100E12

Since there are 7E9 people living today, that is 14,286 combinations available per person, or 14 286 to 1 chance of a identical duplicate combination, if everyone had one account! Only if the numbers were purely random though, which of course they won't be!

I can't find any evidence of another bank other than my branch with my sort code. Perhaps it should be standard policy for banks to issue unique international sort codes?

nonnatus

Like everything - It's only as safe as the Numpty using it :rotfl:

Take_it_like_a_man,_sonny

Simple answer, I use the paying in book at the branch. It is read by the machine.

pinkdalek

nonnatus wrote: »

Like everything - It's only as safe as the Numpty using it :rotfl:

Correct!

If you walk around a supermarket with your handbag unzipped then don't be totally shocked if you have your purse stolen. Or if you have your wallet hanging out your bag pocket.

You would not give anyone your door keys, car keys etc so in the same stance you would not give anyone your online banking details.

pqrdef

CLAPTON wrote: »

if you type the correct sort code but the wrong a/c then then it will depend upon how many a/cs codes that particular sort has associated with it..

as a/c numbers are 8 digit long that means there are 99,000,000 possible combinations; however i've no idea how many are actually allocated.

the probability of the number being valid depends both upon the number allocated and on the number of mistakes actually made.

We use 11-digit phone numbers, with 100 billion possible values, but still we get wrong numbers.

To reduce the odds of matching a wrong number to say 1 in a million, we would need enough digits to accommodate all the accounts, plus an extra 6.

Instead of the brute force approach, another way is to use some psychology to avoid the most common errors. E.g. you select numbers so that swapping two adjacent digits doesn't produce another valid number.

However, phone numbers and bank accounts aren't allocated in any intelligent way. Why are we not surprised.

tosyn

What is the guarantee that these same people will not perform the same mistake when using a pay-in slip at the bank's counter ?

I really do not think there is a problem here.
The banks would have had enough thought process behind the margin of errors and the percentage of people falling into that bracket when using online payments .
This news article is cherry picking a really teeny weeny fraction of people - of course it is daily mail !.

My view is, if someone cannot type in 6 + 8 digits correctly and verify the authencity of receiver details by double checking it before clicking the "submit" button- they shouldn't be even in the news ! ..and yes, IB for sure is not for them!

Gromitt

Transferring payments to someone via FPS is there purely as a convenience thing, if you can't trust yourself to do it properly then do it the old fashioned way and send a cheque!

Likewise, if you ask a cashier to make a payment and give the wrong details, the same thing will happen.

It's just typical news/media crap blown out of all proportion.

Whenever I've setup a new payment, I enter and then check all the details, click 'Next', and then check the details a second time before clicking the OK button. Even then, I still send a £1 test payment to make sure it gets there. It's not RS.

shedhead55

Perhaps the gutter press assume people are as careless with internet banking as with voice-mail security.

pmduk

It's August. It's called silly season for a reason.

zerog

I don't understand the fascination with sort codes, isn't it easier to just say that UK bank accout numbers are 14 digits long?

We break them up into 6+8 to make it easier for humans to process and remember, but imagine how many keystrokes are wasted every day by people having to press Tab twice to enter sort codes in groups of 2 digits

I have done an FP into an account which did not exist (because it had not been fully opened yet), and it bounced back to my account immediately.