wachovia begone
Dec. 2nd, 2009 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacEvery once in a while, someone from my bank reminds me that I could do my banking on the web. I decline with thanks and say, "It's not secure." They assure me that their computer system is secure. I'm sure it is, which is why I use their ATMs. (And I love the new check deposit scanning system, which can read even handwritten numbers accurately.) But in order to access it from other computers, I'd have to use the Internet, and that is not secure. If it's not sniffers, it's keyloggers. (When I check my e-mail on a public computer, I open up a Word document, use the "Insert Symbol" command to click in random characters from my username and password without typing them, cut-and-paste the result into the username and password boxes, then add the rest. I have no idea whether this precaution is either necessary or sufficient.)
Another reason for not banking on the Internet is that way I know that any e-mails purporting to be from my, or any other, bank are spam, and I can delete them without bothering to look at them. If I got genuine e-mails from a bank, I'd have to sort through them, which would be a bother. When an unbreakable method of preventing spoofed e-mail has been invented, I'll accept e-mail from a bank. Not before.
This came to mind reading a follow-up article about the slow merger of Wells Fargo and Wachovia. The first bank spam e-mails I ever received was a huge barrage all claiming to be from Wachovia. Now, Wachovia was a very old bank, down in North Carolina or somewhere, but at the time it was a very new behemoth, and had not yet expanded to the west coast. I had never heard of it, and thought that the spammers had made up the bank name along with their pitch.
Boy was I surprised when I visited the New York area a few months later and discovered there really was a bank by that name. But to this day when I see it I think ... SPAM. That's not a branding experience a company really wants.
I'll go no further than using credit cards, where I have some control over the bill before I have to pay it. I bought something over the web and found duplicate charges on my statement. I phoned up the company, they looked at my record and said, "Oops." That was easy.
Such matters are also to mind when facing a proposal by an enthusiast at the temple library to install a battery of free-access web computers. At a library that's not regularly staffed, and is filled with ingenious and untrustworthy children? That does not strike me as a good idea.
Another reason for not banking on the Internet is that way I know that any e-mails purporting to be from my, or any other, bank are spam, and I can delete them without bothering to look at them. If I got genuine e-mails from a bank, I'd have to sort through them, which would be a bother. When an unbreakable method of preventing spoofed e-mail has been invented, I'll accept e-mail from a bank. Not before.
This came to mind reading a follow-up article about the slow merger of Wells Fargo and Wachovia. The first bank spam e-mails I ever received was a huge barrage all claiming to be from Wachovia. Now, Wachovia was a very old bank, down in North Carolina or somewhere, but at the time it was a very new behemoth, and had not yet expanded to the west coast. I had never heard of it, and thought that the spammers had made up the bank name along with their pitch.
Boy was I surprised when I visited the New York area a few months later and discovered there really was a bank by that name. But to this day when I see it I think ... SPAM. That's not a branding experience a company really wants.
I'll go no further than using credit cards, where I have some control over the bill before I have to pay it. I bought something over the web and found duplicate charges on my statement. I phoned up the company, they looked at my record and said, "Oops." That was easy.
Such matters are also to mind when facing a proposal by an enthusiast at the temple library to install a battery of free-access web computers. At a library that's not regularly staffed, and is filled with ingenious and untrustworthy children? That does not strike me as a good idea.
