How to protect your bank account from digital thievery

I'm writing this article today to share some of my experience with all you fine hubbers in having my bank account compromised twice and the lessons I've learned to since protect myself from such attacks and how you can protect yourself. I, like many others in this digital age, have moved from being cash-centric to card-centric, using my bank card to do the buying. This society we live in today has many would-be thieves that are eager to take your hard earned money and its easier than ever, but you can save yourself some trouble as well as help out your credit.

Okay, so you can use your debit card, but think about the capabilities of this particular piece of plastic. This card is linked to your bank account, and if you're like most Americans, your account is holding essentially the combined wealth of your family that you use to buy food, pay bills, etc. If a thief gets hold of your card information, they can access and take all of your money. Now this of course can be reversed, but you could find yourself out of money for a few days with nowhere to turn and nothing to do, personal experience talking here. You should really only use your debit card at places that you know and trust with point of sale machines that you can easily and readily identify. Now thats all well and good, but what about gas stations and buying online you ask? Glad you brought it up, get a secured credit card.

Credit cards can be a pitfall for many who don't know how to control their spending. I won't get into responsible spending, but will assume that you're an adult and can deal with a credit card. That said, an excellent way to protect your bank account is to assume that at some point, someone will compromise your card security and drain your account. Working with this assumption is a bit pessimistic, but unfortunately money is something we can't seem to do without and this line of thought works wonderfully for protecting you and your family. If someone gets hold of your credit card and drains the account, you still have your regular finances to fall back on while the credit card company eliminates the false charges and gets you your money back. This process takes time and having your main finances untouched allows for a much less stressful situation when dealing with the financial institutions.

The benefits of using a secured vs. unsecured credit card are that with a secured card, you put money into the card account and have that money to use with the credit card. As you generate purchases, the bank will charge you interest on the balance (typically higher than an unsecured card because they have to pay you interest for the cash you have in the account) and you'll make regular payments that will show up on your credit report and begin to boost your credit rating. With an unsecured card, you get a lower interest rate, don't make interest on the cash available (cause its not yours), and typically people with bad credit can't get unsecured cards whereas people with horrible credit can get secured cards.

Now comes the interesting part, how in the world are these people getting the info from your cards and charging them up? Well, there are a few schemes out there but the most popular seems to be the atm out of order scheme. Thieves are able to create a false front to an atm and mount it on the top of the original atm machine. Built into this false front is a scanner in the card slot that records the magnetic strip and a keylog for when you type in your pin. This basically gives the thieves everything they need to duplicate your card and go nuts. False fronts are typically recognized by a deeper than normal screen at the atm or if there are two atm's, one might say out of order (a ploy the thieves use to lure you to the false one). If you see an out of order atm next to a running one and it appears at all strange, you might be better off finding another atm. Its better safe than sorry especially as typically you will be using your debit card at your banks atm. False fronts are also not the entire atm in alot of cases, they can simply be a new cover on the atm card slot and a camera above the keypad. These skimmers can cost about $1500 to $2000 to buy on ebay and will rake in alot more cash for the thieves than what they put into it.

Gas stations are another very popular place to pick up your info. Like banks, the machine can have an attachment where you slide in your card and a logger on the keypad that reads your info you type in. Though this is definitely possible, I got my card info stolen wirelessly at a gas station. I was informed that the gas pumps at some stations communicate wirelessly to a central point and then transmit the information for purchases. Apparently someone had gotten into the network and were able to decrypt the information, thus giving them my info. Not much you can do to protect yourself there except to pay inside or again, use your credit card for purchases in areas that you can't really protect yourself from.

When purchasing items online, thieves have gotten incredibly skillfull at creating very realistic sites that are identical in every sense to the original. When you visit the fake site and enter your card information then they collect it all and use it to make their own purchases with your account. This is probably the single easiest way for them to gain your information and the quickest way for them to turn it around to instant profit. That means that this form of theft is the one you have to be the most resolute in identifying and protecting yourself from. When purchasing online, make sure to only ever buy from sites you trust. Clicking on links to get to a pay site can get you to a fake version quicker than you can imagine, its safer to get to the site yourself. An example is purchasing something that wants you to log into paypal. Ebay has a streamlined procedure for getting you to paypal, but if you're on some random site and it tries to link you to paypal, ensure that the web address is legitimately paypal or even go to paypal.com and log in that way to access the payment request. There is also an email that thieves will send out to numerous email addresses individually that requests you "update your info" on Paypal that will link you to a bogus version of the site. I use Paypal as an example because it seems the most prevalent and has hundreds of fake Paypal sites reported to the legitimate Paypal every day.

With all this said, don't be afraid to buy online or use your card at the pump, but be safe and keep your bank account limited to trusted purchases and use your credit card when doing purchases that could possibly go badly. Not only will this keep your hard earned money safe, but it will allow you to build your credit by charging and paying off the credit card regularly which will in turn boost your score. The first time someone got my info was from a gas station skimmer and the second time was buying online, I've sinced learned my lesson (I was a bit overconfident in my ability to detect a scam) but want to share the experience with others. Lastly, there are simply sometimes where you can't prevent the inevitable such as the Sony hacks that compromised many, many cards, but if you're dealing with a low value credit card on file, its alot easier to approach with a cool head. Hopefully some of you find this information useful and I thank you for reading.