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Bank Accounts for Sale – A Good Reason to Go Offshore
By admin | December 17, 2008
Imagine going to a meeting in a 5-star hotel lobby, pretending to represent an online gambling operation, and receiving a CD containing details of 1.2 million individual bank accounts. Well that’s exactly what happened recently in Hamburg, Germany – the ‘buyers’ were really reporters for German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche, and the ’sellers’ were just offering proof that they could deliver a total of 21 million accounts.
We’re not talking about a few hacked bank accounts for sale here. We’re talking about invasion of personal financial privacy on an immense scale. According to the magazine, three out of four German households would have to be afraid that some money could be taken from their checking account without their authorisation, and perhaps even without their realising it. This kind of grand scale data theft is of the type mentioned in an article covering cybercrime, data refineries and encryption on the Q Wealth Report’s Privacy Technology page.
In another case, a former Canadian IT executive has been accused of purloining a computer tape containing personal information of 3.2 million customers that could net as much as $10m on the black market, according to The Register.
And in still another case recently, online payment service CheckFree apparently lost control of at least two of its domains on in an attack that sent customers to servers run by a notorious crime gang based in Eastern Europe. A customer, apparently concerned over invalid security certificates, called CheckFree’s support number and informed them. They had not even noticed the problem.
Occurences like these are going to become more and more common, as more and more data is linked by identifiers such as Social Security numbers. Data refineries in Eastern Europe specialize in collecting banking information stolen at different times, by differerent people in different places, and collating everything together to create a perfect profile of an individual for online banking fraud. With initiatives such as Real ID in the USA and the National ID Card Scheme in the UK, the problem is just set to become worst. More standardized and better referenced ID profiles makes things much easier for the cyber criminals.
It is quite realistic in my view to suggest that this kind of crime is capable of bringing down an entire nation’s banking system. Imagine if a crime syndicate launched attacks on 21 million accounts at once. This is quite within the realms of technical possibility. It just requires one little security flaw, somewhere, one careless move on the part of a tired bank security official to let the process begin.
Of course, you could argue, why would criminals want to bring down the banking system when instead they could just milk it – exactly as they are doing now, in fact. Hmm. Why would anyone want to destroy the twin towers?
Come to that, would you have believed a week ago that a sole Ponzi hyper could steal $50 billion from the likes of Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander and HSBC?
Does banking offshore provide a solution? In part yes. For a variety of reasons I might go in to another time if people are interested, but mainly simply because of lack of volume, hacking into offshore online bank accounts is neither so easy nor such an attractive proposition. Onshore, online bank accounts are a much softer and more financially attractive target.
Of course, you shouldn’t rely on the banking system altogether. Investment 101 is diversify, diversify, diversify. What would happen if Mastercard and Visa went down for a week? Would you manage? I would suggest keeping at least a month’s worth of living money in cash in a safe place at home, and diversifying a good part of your savings into physical gold and silver bullion coins that will hold their value in the event of a financial meltdown. And if you are going to use the banking system, as you probably must, hold multiple bank accounts in multiple currencies in multiple countries!
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Topics: Banks and banking offshore, Cautionary tales and real cases | No Comments »
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