Tag Banks

The Big Brush Off

Michael 9 Comments
Who knew there was a name for it? I suppose that makes it easier for headlines and reporting, but this one you didn’t even see there. I first heard it when it popped up in the middle of a followup news story. “It’s called brushing,” the helpful reporter helpfully reported. Of course now it’s all over the place.
 
You remember those seeds people would find in the mail. Seeds from China not ordered yet delivered to mailboxes across America. In the third month of wide spread quarantines due to COVID, mysterious packages from China weren’t received with the awe and elation one might more typically express at finding surprise packages under a tree in December. It turned out the seeds were just that. Seeds. Mostly flowers, some herbs. Just seeds. And it turned out that just seeds weren’t just the only things showing up in mailboxes. People reported receiving sunglasses, stickers, speakers, and socks. The common factors in all these, besides the items starting with “s,” were the absence of any sender documents, invoices, or packing slips, and they weren’t ordered by the people receiving them.
 
“It’s called brushing.” It’s also not new. Last year multiple claims of unordered items being received were reported to Amazon as were they also in 2018. The earliest report of the scam I found was in October of 2017 and I wasn’t working that hard to find any. By then it appeared to be already very well established and a common practice in e-commerce. According to the Better Business Bureau brushing is the practice where a company, usually a third-party seller, sends items to an address that they found online or from a purchased mailing list. The intention is to make it appear as though a verified buyer purchased the product and wrote a glowing online review of the merchandise. This not only increases product ratings but since the item is actually “purchased” it increases the company’s sales leading to more contracts for the third party handler. Typically they are cheap items small enough that can be shipped inexpensively.
 
Representatives from various agencies and organizations including the BBB, the Federal Trade Commission, and the U. S. Postal Service recommend that if you receive an unordered package to contact the retailer or shipper if identified on the label and report that you have been the victim of the scam, and in the case of seeds or edible products to forward the package to local authorities or the United States Department of Agriculture. According to the FTC if you decide you want to keep the item you can because it is in its opinion a “free gift.”
 
Where is the downside except for the long shot possibility that a seed could turn your backyard a Little Shop of Horrors clone? For one, the one that all the experts keep bringing up, how did the sender get your name and address? Face it fellas, our names and addresses aren’t secret. I couldn’t begin to count the number of companies, agencies, clubs, and services that have my name and address. Of more concern that nobody mentions is this third party seller is posting a review in your name and that can’t be done unless you are signed into the site. Suddenly the recommendation everyone makes to change your passwords, even though they don’t say why, is making more sense.
 
And now finally after about five hundred words on brushing I get to the point of today’s post. Just how secure can we make our information even changing passwords and security questions on a regular basis. (By the way, those security questions – does anybody lie about them? Wouldn’t that make more sense? I mean if they are the last line of defense and somebody has already cracked your 23 character upper and lower case, number and special character containing password that you change every 4 days, surely they know what street you grew up on. But I digress.)
 
Banks and security, they don’t go together like pork and beans. I thought of this last week when my daughter told me her credit card issued by a local bank was used by someone to subscribe to some ongoing monthly service. She discovered this while she was reviewing her monthly statement. She contacted the vendor, confirmed the fraudulent charge, contacted the bank and was issued a new card, along with being issued the routine “change your password, PIN, and security questions” instructions. Because that card was one she used for some of her own recurring monthly subscriptions and payments she would have to reenter all that information in those sites. She recieved her new card and began the process of updating payment information when she noticed a vendor already had the new numbers on her profile. Thinking she had just done that and forgot she moved on to another and found their information had been likewise updated. This prompted a new call to the bank and she was informed that “as a service” the bank routinely provides the new information to recurring payment vendors. She reminded them her account had been compromised by way of a recurring payment vendor and asked if they thought was the best course of action to be distributing people’s private information. The response was “most people appreciate not having to go through all that work.”
 
Now that was the real brush off. 

Day In and Day Out

Michael 3 Comments

Yesterday was a glorious day in my neck of the woods. Sunny and warm, with temperatures in the mid 60s. Very April-like which was a relief from the February-ish November we just escaped. If you didn’t know better (unless you live in south Florida) you’d not know there were only 23 days until Christmas.

SantaWhen I was a kid we always knew how long till Christmas. That goes with childhood. You could have asked any random 9 year old on May 6 how long till Christmas and without hesitation would have gotten “only 233 days!” in reply. Parents got a little extra help. Beginning the day after Thanksgiving the morning paper posted a happy Santa holding his nice or naughty list proclaiming “20 Shopping Days Until Christmas!” That’s what yesterday’s paper would have printed. Yes, back then there was a difference between days until Christmas and shopping days ‘til Christmas.

This isn’t a post about how great things were in those good old days. I just want to point out that back then the stores weren’t open on Sunday and on Christmas Eve it wasn’t unusual for many to close before dinner time so the employees could be home with their families. Not every day was a shopping day. Of course today the stores can be closed and still shopping gets done through the magic of on-line retailers and electronic charging or cash transfers. Still those places with real doors will be opening them every day until Christmas.

Except …

Not everything is open on Sunday. And I don’t mean the post office. You can receive and they do deliver mail on Sunday. No, I mean banks. Banks, those financial institutions that try very hard in their ads to convince us that they are just ordinary people like the rest of us mere mortals working to make our money work hard for us. Uh huh.

Over the years they’ve made it handy enough for us to do most banking without their input. Automated teller machines have been around for years along with on line money transfers and automated recurring payments. Just like you would expect in the 21st century. Then why in a day when a merchant can determine whether you have enough in your checking account to cover that new OLED TV with your debit card even if it is 2:00 on a Sunday afternoon, and manage to reduce your balance by the price of that TV (plus tax and extended warranty) they still make you wait three days with you make a deposit “for the check to clear.” And why do they never tell you what they are doing with that money in the interim. It seems like they don’t have to long for the good old days. They never left them.

Back to shopping though. With now just 22 days till Christmas (and if I recall last year some retailers were actually guaranteeing same day delivery of select items ordered by noon on Christmas day making it now 23 shopping days till Christmas) I better get myself in gear. I have a lot of preparations to make. No, not a lot of shopping to do. I don’t do much shopping for Christmas. I’ll still put together a small stocking for my daughter (after 29 years the Santa fantasy is now more mine than hers), but otherwise the gifts to and from the rest of the family are our love and company.

The preparations I have to make are keeping my recycle bin empty for the daily onslaught of printed “gift guides” and my “Delete Finger” limber for elimination of the electronic version of those same and similar guides from my email inbox. Has anybody noticed those gift guides all seem to bear recommendations for anybody on your Christmas list with gifts from the same store? Who would have thought your 96 year old aunt and your 7 month old great nephew can be satisfied in a single trip to the same hunting and camping emporium. And no I am not receiving that email because I requested it. I never heard of you before and where is the “click here to unsubscribe” line?

One thing I don’t have to prepare for is an unusually warm Christmas. In fact we get back to December weather later today with falling temperatures and snow by morning. For those of you living in south Florida that’s the white stuff Frosty is made of.

It’s Increditable

Michael Leave a comment

Recently I came into some money and did what I’ve wanted to do for years – pay off everything. You see, even though I’ve posted here any number of semi-rants about credit card companies and how we’ve come to pretty much ignore common sense and are willing to charge just about everything including a trip to McDonald’s, for years I had been guilty of just such stupidity. Over the past 5 or 6 years I hadn’t used a credit card but I was still paying for my imprudent spending for 30 years before then. Fortunately I have lived long enough to pay off all of those card and other loan balances.

Let me tell you now though, if you ever plan to do the same, prepare yourself for some pretty annoying communications between you and your soon to be former creditors. I knew enough to know that interest charged is charged daily. That means the balance you see on your statement isn’t your balance any more by the time you get your statement. I called every credit card company or bank (and there were a lot of them) to request payoff amounts. Out of ten lenders, only 3 representatives knew what I was asking. To the others, the thought of paying off everything owed was as foreign as using antennae to get TV reception.  They would parrot the auto-attendant’s parroting of the “last statement balance” and didn’t know that wasn’t the total balance. Fortunately I was able to get the information I needed from a call center supervisor. Perhaps that was unfortunate.

Even with a current balance in hand, a human on the phone, and an ability to pay the stated amount immediately, four of the accounts sent statements the following amount with new interest accrued and due. After making several more calls I was able to ascertain that the reason there were still balances was because although the amount paid equaled the amount due on the day of the call, the amount paid was not credited for 3 to 5 business days resulting in 3 to 5 days of accrued interest. So once again I had to request new payoff amounts and submit new payments. I was not amused.

One account I had actually overpaid. When given a figure it was for interest charged through the end of the billing cycle so when my payment was credited in 3 to 5 business days it was still a few days before the cycle ended and I ended up with a credit for that card. Since I was simultaneously closing accounts as I was paying them off, I had no account for the credit to be credited against. Yet, it was still listed as a credit on a following statement with no mention of how I was going to get my money back. Not wanting to, I called anyway. I was told certainly they could send me a refund check. I don’t know why but I had to ask, why they didn’t just send a check instead of a statement showing a credit for an account that didn’t exist. Their answer was that it was policy to report a balance on an inactive account for three billing cycles before issuing a refund. I thanked them for their information and informed them that if I ever decided to re-open a card with them I would consider the three month rule before I decide to issue them a check. They weren’t amused.

Who were these people anyway? The three cards’ telephone reps who hadn’t a clue about how to determine a payoff amount were all serviced by Citicards, the fourth was issued by RBS Citizens Financial.  The company who wanted to hang on to my money for three months unless I asked for it earlier was Discover. Capital One, USAA, and HSBC were the only creditors who actually were helpful in paying off their accounts.

Certainly it was my fault for getting into more credit than I had a right to. When I finally had the means to get out of debt instead of getting out of Dodge I did so. Apparently those I owed would have preferred I continued to owe them. That’s ok. It took a few months and lots of phone calls but now instead of a bunch of cards I carry around a bunch of money. Boy does that confuse the people at McDonald’s.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

Breach My Britches

Michael Leave a comment

We’ve talked about this before and people aren’t listening.  Or maybe they are and they don’t care.  After all, it’s their money if they want to give it away.  It just seems that it’s more the Average Joe and Josephine that are being bamboozled.  And just what are we talking about?  Call it what you will from the polite “breach” to the let’s-be-honest-about-this “theft.”  (And you’re probably figuring out that this isn’t going to be one of those breezy, happy go lucky posts today.)

So, here’s the deal.  Now K-Mart has joined Target and Home Depot and Michael’s and even P. F. Chang’s and Dairy Queen having had their charge systems hacked.  And what about all the other stores owned by the same companies?  If K-Mart’s systems have been compromised what about Sears and Lands’ End and Parts Direct?  Is our money in peril at these stores also?

How do we know these attacks are aimed at the little guys, the you’s and me’s of the world?  Look at the targets, like Target.  Not the sort of places Donald Trump patronizes.  Why us?  Because is seems for the good or bad, our demographic doesn’t pay much attention to our money.  We’re funny that way.  We might make sure our 401K is being matched but we willingly hand over our debit and credit card numbers to any retailer – brick and mortar, on-line, or phone.  It might only be a $10 purchase but it’s usually $10 we don’t have in our pockets and pull out a card for payment.  Stop and think about it.  When was the last time you used real money for gas?

So using money might help to fix things.  If there aren’t cards being used then cards’ information can’t be stolen.  But what about virtual stores?  You can’t stuff a $20 bill into a modem.  We used to use things called checks.  We would order something, send in a check for payment, and the store sent us merchandise in return.  Just like with money!  So you had to wait a few extra days but it beats spending days on end trying to convince the good folks at your local bank that you really didn’t go to Barbados last weekend and spend $2,400 on Jet Ski rentals.

If you think you’d like to get in on this new-fangled thing called money you better do it quickly.  It seems a number of banks are considering doing away with, and some actually already have done away with branch offices.  They could soon be no bank to go to get money.  We’ll still have ATMs but they aren’t any more secure than the stores’ money systems.  In fact, banks have already been hacked.  JP Morgan Chase may be the most recent, and affecting 76 million households the largest, but it’s not the first bank to lose our data.  (See list below.)

Where do you shop?  Big box stores, grocery stores, on-line? This year’s retail “winners” in the data breach contest are the thieves who hacked into Home Depot, Target, Supervalu, Neiman Marcus, Michael’s, E-Bay, and K-Mart.  Where do you bank?  There are too many of them that have been lost to thieves to even think about.  And when you think about banking don’t just think about your debit card.  Where are your credit cards issued, processed, and billed?  Who holds your investments?  Do you have retirement funds sitting somewhere?  And who will be next?  Insurance companies or utilities?

A poll taken by the Travelers’ insurance companies in July of this year discovered that only 23 percent of those questioned worry a great deal about identity theft.  Even though the past year has seen at least a half-dozen major news stories on significant data breaches, this number is actually less than those who worried a great deal about identity theft in May of last year (31%).

So come on now.  Join us and join the folding money brigade.  Do you know where your cash is?

Now that’s what we think. Really. How ‘bout you.

 

(To see our past posts on this topic please enter “Debit” into the search box at the upper right of this screen.  To see the real scary stuff, type in “Bank Data Breach” or “Retail Data Breach” into a search engine, skip the articles and go straight to the comments.  Scary, scary.)

The Top Ten Data Breaches per Bankrate.com (Data from 2013, does not include 2014 incidences.):

Target (affected 40 million card accounts and 70 million customer data for $1.5 billion)
Global Payments, Inc. (1.5 million card accounts for $90 million)
Tricare US Military medical insurance (5 million beneficiaries’ identities stolen)
Citibank (360,000 credit card accounts for $19.4 million)
Sony (100 million users’ identities stolen)
Heartland Payment Services, credit card processor (130 million card accounts for $2.8 billion)
Bank of New York- Mellon (12.5 million customers’ personal data lost during back-up transfer)
Countrywide Financial (17 million accounts downloaded by employee and sold to other lenders)
T. J. Maxx (90 million card accounts for $2.47 billion)
Veterans’ Administration (26.5 million veterans and active duty identities stolen)

Tax and Fees Extra

Michael Leave a comment

“And of course because this is a foreign check we’ll have to hold it for 5 days.  Which account would you like it held against?”  The question was absolutely serious.  And He of We was absolutely dumbfounded.  “Foreign?  Well yes, it does come all the way from Kentucky.”  And thus he found himself on the receiving end of a lecture, a real honest to gosh lecture, about how the banking industry works to protect our deposits.

She of We got her own lecture two weeks later when her credit union debit card was refused by a merchant because the bank had inactivated it.  It was very good of the bank to do so since it appeared that someone had possibly stolen her card numbers and attempted to buy something out of country.  But nobody told her.  She found out 3 days later.  During that time she attempted two local purchases which were refused and called the credit union.  She spoke with a live operator who suggested she try her card again in an ATM.  After the ATM was no more help than the live telephone version she went to the branch to inquire and was then told that her card had been suspended.

While She of We was waiting at the teller window another patron at the next window was having his own issues with cards and funds.  It seems he stopped at a gas station and “Paid at the Pump” with his debit card.  Forty-five dollars.  But his computer statement told him the account had been debited $70.  Where was the other $25?  And why was it not in his account where it would have stopped a check of his from being returned unpaid for which the institution charged him another fee.

If we remember all the details, a foreign check is one drawn against an account from any bank other than the one to which He of We was attempting to deposit it.  If that check should not clear we will be charged a fee for depositing a check that is not backed by sufficient funds and we’d be charged a fee immediately and thus place our account balance in jeopardy.  So it’s for our safety. 

Purchases against a debit card are transferred to the bank for approval and if it will be paid or not the merchant is apprised of that by electronic message.  Anywhere in the world.  Immediately.  For our safety.

Unspecified cash total purchases, such as a “pre-approval” to buy gasoline sometime in the future (and apparently sometime in the next 30 seconds of the pump reset is “the future”), is transmitted to the gas pump’s mini-computer with a predetermined spending limit.  Eventually, the predetermined already debited amount is re-credited to the account.  Probably for somebody’s safety.

It’s commendable that a bank would want to protect its customers from fraudulent transactions but we have some questions.  What if the debit card number thief had try to make a purchase in Hartford Connecticut rather than Hamburg Germany?  Was somebody ever going to contact She of We that she was walking around with a useless piece of plastic in her wallet?  Why isn’t the card holder made aware of the amount of held funds for pre-approved purchases and for how long they will be held?  And explain again why Kentucky is foreign? 

These are all accepted US banking practices protected by US and individual states’ banking laws.  A bank can hold funds guaranteed by a check for 5, 7, or 10 days until the issuing bank confirms there is money in the account against which the check is written.  That’s only good practice.  Good practice to hold the check until the receiving bank finds out if the issuing bank has the money.  Good practice for it to take 10 days if the receiving bank is planning on sending a representative by stagecoach to the issuing bank to collect the money. 

The rules were written before electronic funds transfers were common, before the average American had 3 phones and 5 e-mail addresses, before people traded in their folding money for a piece of plastic that is easier to carry, and if lost or stolen easier to report, manage and recover.  Why would anybody want to re-write the rules?  They provide the bank with the opportunity to use somebody else’s money for 3, 5, 10 days to collect additional interest for their accounts.  And after all, they protect our accounts.

When the banks can’t get enough by squirrelling away our money for a week or so they charge fees.  ATM fees, teller fees, call center fees, credit card fees, debit card fees, paper statement fees.  We read recently of a bank that tried to establish fees for using their website.  It was a monthly electronic access fee. The banking is free.  The accounts are “service charge free.”  However, if you want to find out how much money you have on deposit you have to pay a fee.

Used to be all banks were worried about was someone holding up the stage coach.  A banks real challenge now is measured by how to creatively phrase the next fee they will charge you and convince you that by paying these small fees translates into large balances later.  If you believe that, we have a bridge we’d like to sell you. 

But you have to pay the closing cost fees.  It’s for your safety.

Now, that’s what we think.  Really.  How ‘bout you?