WARNING ABOUT BANK SECURITY ISSUES-DON'T GIVE ANYONE CALLING YOUR DETAILS! (Top)
Banking Details Security Issue opening doors to Identity Theft
The latest practices by banks in telephoning customers to "discuss a banking matter" followed by the request to "identification" by revealing to an unknown caller your very security details that are needed to access your account for security and privacy reasons is an open invitation to identity theft or at least to clean out your bank account! What follows next, if you refuse to identify yourself is the invariable assurance that, by ringing a phone number belonging to the respective bank (which anybody can look up in the phone book or on the internet), one can confirm that the bank indeed wanted to call you.
Now there are two problems:
Firstly, these phone numbers are usually 1800 or 1300 numbers going to a call center and the same person almost never answers the phone and you can not be connected to a specific operator, so that means going to the famous identification process again without any guarantee and invariably, after having been on hold for ages being brainwashed either by the banks advertising or by the most repetitive "music" possible, usually consisting of some sort of electronic imitation of drums and high frequency percussion sound with the most monotonous and aggravating rhythms they can come up with, you have to explain, that you are calling, because they want something from you which they can’t tell you what it is. Would you expect anyone to go through this punishment and then be in a friendly mood and calm and collected when the banks tells you that they can't find the payment you made last week and they ask you to pay them again?
Secondly, if the phone number you are given is not listed, it would most likely lead to the person that called you, OK, but even if this person answers with the name of the respective bank or institution, who can tell if this is not in fact the very way by an operator of a scam designed to get banking details and all vital identity information from you, to keep you feeling safe?
This relatively recent practice is an absolute stupid attempt to ensure peoples' privacy and identity defeating the intended purpose by opening the doors widely to the waiting scam operator.
People need to be warned about it and the banks and other institutions need to come up with a better way, f.e. for your local Manager, who knows you and who recognises your voice and whom you recognise and trust, to make the call and solve the problem locally and efficiently instead of involving call centers. What's wrong with that?
Why doesn't anybody think things through before implementing such a potentially dangerous regulation? In the middle ages a person who came up with such nonsense would have been strung up on a windy mountaintop for the vultures to feed on... Why do we put up with such blatant malpractices by our financial institutions?
I would suggest charging them a $40.- fee for answering such calls every time it happens and double it for every repeat.
