Man has $250K vanish from checking account | Hacker News Reader

Man has $250K vanish from checking account

chicago.cbslocal.com

At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, this could have been an internal actor at the bank. The money wasn’t lost; it was moved to an investment account, apparently under the same name. There’s a big push at Chase to get people to use their investment accounts, to the point that I get flyers promising hundreds of dollars to do so. It could be that someone at Chase saw this as an easy way to bump their numbers.

Normally, I would consider this a far-fetched fantasy, but after seeing similar fraud at Wells Fargo as a result of their incentive programs, nothing would surprise me.

When they were breaking up Bell Canada's monopoly on long distance services, the newer long distance providers would use call centers to get people to sign up. Sometimes a shadier phone worker wanting to make their quota would sign people up even if they said they weren't interested.

There was a term for it. I think it was "slamming" but if that's the wrong word, it was something like that.

Because of it, the alt providers had to hire outside verifiers, who literally have no stake in whether the sale goes through or not, to come on the line immediately after any customer signs on, to verify their information and that they really do want the service and were not tricked or coerced into it.

Everyone who worked as a verifier that I knew said the same thing: they had to cancel a LOT of new accounts because of this "slamming." The most affected were the elderly, and people with thick accents.

At this time, ONLY Ma Bell could provide local service. Thankfully all that is well behind us now, and whatever company provides your local service also provides your LD (unless you use a discount card, of course). Of course there is an all out war between the major providers buying out the smaller "discount" providers, but it is still infinitely better than what we had before then. And with cell phones, it's a completely moot point.

I recall talking to a guy who was a contractor to banks that helped them with security. I asked what happened in cases where someone had money stolen via an online breach.

He said, “If the thief stole $50, the bank would make it up to keep you as a happy customer. If it was $50,000, well, the bank doesn’t want you as a customer that much.”

Welcome to the 2020s.

The leaks from corporations, social media, webmail and cloud storage will keep piling up; bad actors will increasingly cross-reference them. Cheaper storage, faster network speeds, and more capable AI (eg: to identify faces) will exacerbate the problem.

It's a disaster looming over our near future.

But he wipes his hard drive every couple weeks.

this suggests the compromise may not be exploitation of his equipment, a firmware exploit may be a possibility, but i would put my bets on the banking infrastructure being exploited

"Wipes it every few weeks" probably means he has his data on a flash drive or external hard drive that he plugs in everytime. Of course it's probably far simpler than that~insider threat at the bank committing Wells Fargo style upsell fraud or simply password reuse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com