As is the case with any technological development, methods exist to circumvent whichever safety precaution any ingenious engineer is clever enough to devise. As has been the case with the banking industry in particular, customer accounts have been a lucrative target for a long time, in what has been described as a quick way to make an easy living by a roguish gentleman declaring “that’s where the money is.”
Clydesdale Bank has experienced such difficulties in the form of online phishing scams, which target customers by requesting their Clydesdale internet banking account information through an anonymous email. While on occasion these appear in the form of random, unsolicited text emails, they are more often disguised to resemble the banks, including logos and other design elements that mimic the sort of emails one might receive from legitimate customer service representatives.
These emails usually request customers divulge their online banking account numbers and passwords, which can then be used to log in to the service without the customer’s authorization or knowledge. Alternatively, these emails can simply include links within the text, which lead customers to a site that resembles the bank, but the fields in which clients enter their login information simply mine the data, sending them later to the creator of the email, who can then use the information to gain access to the account.
It turns out that enough people are willing to fall for this trick that a business model can be built upon doing exactly such things. It can be very damaging financially when someone loses access to his or her account, and can often take a while to resolve, despite the vast majority of banks declaring that customers will not be liable for such charges in the event of such a problem.
However, these problems are largely preventable, and there is little reason one needs to expect to have to deal with this sort of difficulty, if properly advised on how to avoid encountering such a problem. Firstly, banks do not request customer information; if someone needs to log in to an account, he or she can do so by visiting the actual website of the bank, typing the URL directly into the browser. This entirely circumvents any possibility of this email being used to collect a password, since none of the fraudulent links were clicked. This is the simplest way to ensure this particular type of bank fraud does not occur; simply avoiding responding to these unsolicited requests altogether, in which case they have no effect on a customer’s account. Clients can report such fraudulent emails, which helps the banks respond to them quickly, in which case they will be more capable of preventing the email from doing further damage to other clients.
It is unlikely that clients will ever be entirely free from the problems caused by online banking problems such as phishing scams, and fraudsters are likely to become far more sophisticated with newer and more devious methods in the future. Clydesdale Bank, as is the case with most other modern banks, includes security recommendations and guarantees for its clients, which customers are advised to check once in a while to ensure up-to-date understanding of such issues.
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Clients can peruse the security recommendations as well as a full description of features at CBonline, where they can learn of the full set of features available through Clydesdale internet banking.
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