Free Money

[stopthegop]

I've seen on ebay and elsewhere sellers requesting payment via bank wire or "direct bank deposit".  Then they openly publish:

1. The name of their bank.
2. The country in which they live.
3. The IBN routing number of the bank (which is easy to obtain if you know the name of the bank..).
4. Their account number!
5. Their first name and second initial.

Anyone see a potential problem with this???   Let me put it this way:  Just as easily as money can be "direct deposited" into an account, so can money be directly withdrawn from an account.  A dirty little secret of online banking is that numbers are usually all that are compared for verification purposes (birthdays, zip codes, etc..).  Names are frequently not used because they are inconsistent (Mike, Michael, Mikey, Mick, Miguel...etc).  So, as in this example, the seller has basically given the entire world carte blanche to his money.   In short, do not ever, ever, ever disclose your bank account number and especially not in conjunction with the bank's name or IBN number!  Some people must learn the hard way..

[stopthegop]

Sorry, but you are both wrong.  I can't even be bothered to explain why.

But if I'm wrong, then why don't you go ahead and tell us all where you bank and what your bank account number is?  Its 100% safe, right?


edit:  you have balls, piru.  I'll give you that.  

[stopthegop]

I'm not going to do that.  Its illegal.  But its a leap of faith to say it can't be done

[stopthegop]

Piru:  

Well it sounds like Finland has its act together in that regard.  Much more so than here in the US, which is what I was writing about since that is where I live (and bank).  Just for argument's sake, lets say you (or anyone) went and initiated a wire from a website that is, shall we say, less secure than the website run by your bank in Finland.  Moneygram, for example.  Maybe Western Union..

On Moneygram, you can wire anyone (even yourself)cash  using a checking account, which is considered "verified" if you have the account number and IBN number.  They also require that you provide a credit card as a "backup funding source".  But what if the credit card belongs to someone else, and the checking account to yet a third person?  I  know for a fact that they don't verify the name you give them against the name on record with the bank or the credit card company.  See how they cover their own *ss by making you (or someone) essentially "pay" twice, but otherwise they play fast and loose by not even checking to see if the person requesting the wire is the same name associated with the checking account and is the same name of the person on file with the credit card company?  

But then again, lets say you're really in a pinch and you need to wire some cash electronically, AND everything is 100% legit?  What then?  Would your bank in Finland allow the wire?  How would it know the difference between these two transfer requests - one legit, the other complete bullsh1t (wrong name, but valid account numbers, etc) and initiated from a website (or even over the phone) by a company that isn't your bank?    

Like I said, if you can wire money in, its probably not that hard to wire it out.
   

[stopthegop]

One big problem with our system is with online "verification" when using a debit or credit card.  You go to all the trouble of filling in these stupid forms that are supposedly "secure" and it turns out you can enter totally randon bullsh1t for "name", "address", "email", "province", and "occupation".  No comparison is done on any of these fields to verify the initiator is the actual owner of the account.   At most the software might check the zip code against the one on file -- only because its easy.  This isn't true of all merchants' websites, but a damn lot of them.  The banks know this, too.  They have just declared  fraud a fixed expense (like rent) and raised fees to hide it from shareholders.    

How about this scenario?  You setup a credit card to be paid automatically every month from your checking account.  All the data you enter is valid (name, address, ssn, phone number, work, etc..).  When you enter the bank acct. you accidently make a typo and inadvertantly enter the wrong account number.  Since their crappy software doesn't even check the name you enter with the name on the acct, something like that could easily happen!  And probably has.  IMO, US banks get exactly what they deserve with so-called "identity theft" cases.

[stopthegop]

Apparently overdraft fees compensate the risk of fraud, especially since they *are* lucrative for the banks and the banks' insurers probably cover the costs of fraud (or the banks' own profits do, giving them the complacency to whine about the problem without doing anything concrete about it).

Precisely