Comment by rapnie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rapnie | Hacker News Reader

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When I bought my house a couple years ago, I had to put my signature to make a big and urgent money transfer. The bank however didn't accept my signature for some reason, though I had been using it every time with them.

It appeared that normally they not really check if it matches, but this time given the transfer amount they did. And it just so happened that the signature they had scanned in their system was the first one I ever made as a kid (30yrs ago) when I opened the account.

Finally after many retries they turned the monitor to show me the expected signature and let me practice it on a piece of paper, so it would pass some other approval stage.

With a 200 yard line waiting behind me, sweating profusely, I finally managed to reproduce something. The sale went through, luckily, and immediately after I ditched that bank account.

It sounds really useless but requiring a signature means a fraudster would have to forge a signature which is a separate, perhaps more easily proven crime that carries extra penalties.

This kind of poor security is why we need legislation to make banks responsible for financial damages due to identity theft or fraud. When they will be on the hook for potentially millions of dollars, maybe they will care more about security and offer better protections than a signature

> The sale went through, luckily, and immediately after I ditched that bank account.

I believe most banks allow their customers to change their signature to something they can replicate more consistently — but it probably relies on showing up to a branch and producing sufficient ID.

I was told that a bank would not approve a transaction because the signature I had provided in a Word document was not similar enough to the one on file.

Helpfully, they provided me with a screenshot of the one they had on file... one copy and paste later and the problem was resolved.

One copy and paste

> immediately after I ditched that bank account.

Because they showed you the signature and let you practice, right?

Yup, but also because they could have my evolved adult signature on file, or at least asked me after certain time interval to update it for their records.

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