The Security Mentor

Suppose an organized crime gang in Russia cleans out your bank account after you mistakenly answer one of those "please verify your account details" email. What happens next?

You might hope that your bank will put the money back. It's logical: they're in a better position to get the money back from the crooks than you are. They might have insurance to cover fraud losses, in which case of course they've been passing the cost of the insurance premiums along to you.

ComputerActive's Paul Allen reports that UK banks may refuse to reimburse online fraud losses. They're not carrying insurance. They threaten to treat future claims on a "case by case" basis.

We've seen this movie before. US banks had a legal obligation to reimburse customers for money stolen via a cash machine. UK banks didn't. US banks deployed halfway reasonable security technology to save money. UK banks didn't have to. Not only did they refuse to put money back into customer accounts, in one case they even pretended the complaining customer was scamming them and had him arrested.

What to do? You can swing your business to banks that deploy clueful online security, for example single-use passwords. And of course don't hand over secret information like your account number and password unless you're the one who started the transaction.