Information Madness

When your email is hacked, think about protecting your investments first. Most of the time, when people get hacked, they worry about their Facebook friends getting annoyed with them. Before you bother about your friends, get your finances right. While you are alerting your friends, the hacker may be emailing your brokers to wire your assets to a bank account unknown to you. If that happens, no government or securities industry agency is under obligation to reimburse your losses to you.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FIRA) has warned people recently that brokerage firms have fallen for such scams many times. The identity theft takes the hacker bypassing the victim, which is you, straight to a financial institution. The hackers are always busy searching the victim’s `sent’ folder for brokerage account information. The hackers then send an eMail to the broker and request the fund transfer by attaching genuine letters of authorization downloaded from the broker’s website or faking, quite convincingly, letters of that authorization.

If the brokerage firm takes their time in replying, the hackers will remind them and make the case look urgent. Six million dollars have been lost last year in such fraudulent transfers. Some big brokerage companies have stopped accepting wire transfer requests made through eMail. It is always advisable to be careful about your credit cards, debit cards and check advices made through eMails.

Try not to ignore signs when your eMail is hacked. If you get eMail on your smart phone, you have to make sure that your phone is password protected.