A good friend of mine’s bank account was recently raided and cleaned out by hackers. As soon as he found out, within minutes, my friend who, himself is a network engineer, reported the theft to the bank. The money was transferred out of his account and saved in another bank, and from there, sent out of the country. The fraud department staff noted down all the information, and from that point on, fearing possible lawsuit, and based on the legal department’s recommendation maintained total silence.

In the end, did the bank compensate any of the money my friend had lost? None, zero, zilch, nothing, not even a penny.

“You feel so left out, as if my family and friends and the rest of the world had all abandoned me. The first couple of weeks, I would wake up and find myself crying. I had lost a good chunk of my savings, and there was NOBODY that I could turn to.”

“I started looking for an attorney to help me recover, at least part of the money from the bank, but even if I found one, what were our chances of beating the full team of lawyers working for the bank?”

One attorney said his office would not accept cases dealing with dollar amounts less than $100,000.

To further mislead and disappoint the victim, the hackers had even set up internet links to fake lawyers’ offices in Canada and Mexico.

SO WHAT CAN BE DONE? I should say here that the following statements do not apply to all financial institutions. Some have already implemented features, such as those recommended by experts (in diverse ways), but a large number worry more about their transaction volume and the bottom line. In addition, the bank’s attitude towards client losses, and its responsibility towards the customer is, pretty much the same everywhere, and it derives from the banks’ attitude profits before people.

If you are willing to go back to the days of “manual banking”, the solution is very simple. Just call up the bank and disable or remove online banking, but you will have to visit the bank for the smallest of things.

Here is one interim solution before a definitive one is worked on.

A large percent of thefts are done through online banking. The money is lost when an online transfer (wire transfer, of some sort, Zelle, etc.) is initiated. The function is triggered when a request is received to do transfer online. This service should fail at this point if the destination of the transfer is a financial institution outside the bank’s network and the request is through online banking. The bank should then ask the client to visit a branch and show ID.

Nice and simple as it is, many banks refuse to implement this additional feature because it eats into their profits, as transaction volume is slowed and reduced, but the heck with the customer who might lose her/his life’s savings. After all, even though the banks are too big to fail, bank customers are not.

Business as usual in a neo-liberal world: profits before people when it should be people before profits.

The post Of Hackers and Scammers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.