Don't be fooled by cunning con artists

Zanderman wrote: »

Have you lot not got that room yet?

Might that be the room where all the major bank CEOs are hauled in before FCA and PRA under auspices of HM Treasury and told to immediately reimburse all current account confidence tricked customers they have declined in the past 10 years?

That would be no joke.

JuicyJesus wrote: »

It's not the size of the view count, it's what you do with it. And what you've done with it is spouted the same weirdo oddness everyone who refuses to move with the times and fetishises the old Captain Mainwaring style of banking does.

One could also argue you're compensating for something.

Definitely Freudian - one might hope that you do not work in a customer facing role at a bank, as I can see that being a power trip for some troubled minds.

schiff wrote: »

If it mattered I would be worried about the OP.

Don't worry about me, schiff, I've broad shoulders and I am lucky enough to have a satisfying and fulfilled good life.

You have read why I started this thread. I strongly believe that it is very wrong of banks to walk away from the car crashes that their digital businesses make more likely.

They know that most people do not understand the risk. I do more than most. I have a skillset which means I can comment on the problem from very many angles. Yeah no-one likes a smarta$$, but I am not asking to be liked. I have seen the effects of impersonation and account takeover fraud close up many times. My purpose here is to keep the message in public view.

Every time someone knocks the message or the messenger and I notice, I will do my best to correct it. It is not a question of needing to respect others contrary opinions. It is a question of highlighting a known risk because it is not known well enough.

You do not know whether if it happened to you sometime later in life or at a point where you were plain vulnerable whether you would get your money back. Your guard only has to be down for a few seconds to lose your life savings.

For your bank then to argue it is your own silly fault is plain wrong.

For so many naysayers to pile in and others to slavishly apply their thanks to every nay-saying or ridiculing post which effectively calls me and/or fraud victims idiots is a very sad reflection upon UK society. I sometimes think that coming into this sub-forum is a bit like entering the realm of a Darwinian Cult where the adage "survival of the fittest" is worshipped.

And for others to suggest that I suffer some delusion or mental problem for simply giving my time to keep the original message in view - well I think it might be time to take a look in their mirror.

Microsoft Tech Support Scam activity and similar confidence tricks are clearly growing in sophistication and frequency. The tendency to argue otherwise and that there is no risk to non-idiots is akin to poo-pooing the current unusual heatwaves as nothing for sane people to worry about, and is I suppose more likely to be borne out of the ignorance of sheep than any malice aforethought.

Yes I get that people don't like being referred to as sheep. The answer is not to behave like it. I don't. As I said I have a good life and I still for some of it manage to help others quite frequently by guiding not following. Trouble is, that's what confidence tricksters also manage to do in much slicker fashion than me. You can spot one of my threads a mile off, but the work of a confidence trickster upon a receptive mind is far less easy to recognise instantly, and can ultimately spoil a good life in minutes without the subject of moving your money ever being discussed beyond "we can see you have been hacked - they may have hacked your bank account - have you checked it?".

It should not be possible for fraudsters to ride in via such an easy route i.e. by exploiting the ease of digital access to banking, and its skyscraper-ish very narrowly founded security protocols, and worse, the blinkered reliance by banks and others on totally compromised personal data in their systems (e.g. the combination of email addresses and mobile telephone numbers, full names and addresses, and all manner of other confidential personal data already known to be lost to the wild including as part of lost government data and CRA data obtained both semi-legally and illegally, and data harvested from social media, and dismissed ignorantly as low risk) are together in fact the catalysts for planning and executing major fraud against personal eBanking customers.

Every time I get asked on the phone ("for security") for my name address postcode, date of birth, mothers maiden name, email address, even NI number, I know it is all compromised, and not by me, but by corporates and even by the negligence of government.

When a company like Cambridge Analytica folds, where does the data they've been playing with go? Where did the nukes go when USSR broke up?

You can bet your life if the data CA collected was processed for no good reason when the company was live, that it is highly unlikely to have been turned into any force for good now.

Once upon a time, it may have taken ten minutes to download 1.44MB to a floppy disk and take it away from a PC. The entire Holy Bible in plain text uses only 4MB, barely more than an average MP3 audio track. Your average PC at the time may have cost several hundred pounds and of course wasn't exactly pocket-sized.

My iPhone has 132GB of storage capacity (or the equivalent of 33,000 copies of the Bible if you like). It cost £230. It has a slap up to date operating system. All the data in it and transferred from it is transferred at enormous speed wirelessly. It even updates itself, and so do the countless Apps on it, at a time of night it chooses, all without my explicit consent. I could cross any international borders with enormous databases of stolen personal data in my phone.

2018 digital technology is mind-blowing. Confidence tricksters are also into mind-blowing and into technology - it's their calling and their living.

So an alternate thread message might be, don't be a sheep when it comes to forming your views about eBanking, and don't let anyone, least of all me, and more importantly the confidence trickster sitting in a call centre in Calcutta or just up the road from you deciding who to call today, keep thinking you might still be there for the taking.