Gotta love those Bankers

They never give up do they?

Currently if your bank account gets hacked and you lose your life’s savings the banks will take the hit unless you’ve been grossly negligent with your password. But the Financial Times ran a story last week that in summary says that banks have plans to remove their customer’s protection from fraud.

The reason they want to do this is pretty obvious, it currently costs them £755m and is growing at 25% per annum. So the solution is to make it the customer’s problem. Perfect. This means that not only do banks make more profits and can pay themselves even more obscenely, but they also don’t have to think hard and spend money on anti-hacking protections. Concentrating instead on how to make on-line banking more convenient and easy to use – and even easier to hack.

It reminds me a little of the telephony industry’s attitude to VoIP fraud. Here’s an equivalent piece of self-interested policy thinking from BT’s Artificial Inflation of Traffic Group which is responsible for preventing payments made to crooks for stolen phone calls, they…

“…rapidly agreed that it was simply not practicable to extend the domestic AIT scheme for the Standard Interconnect Agreement to take in outgoing IDD [International calls]. […] There is not, and it seems unlikely that there will ever be, a facility to withhold international payments. This is recognised as a growing problem for CPs and an example of where perhaps, fraud and bogus traffic trends are ahead of current legislation. […] PBX hacking or ‘Dial thro’ fraud […] has certainly been prevalent for a while but is now on the increase. […] This was reviewed by the industry AIT group, and rapidly confirmed that PBX hacking and switch security is essentially a matter for the originating network.“

Quick, pass the parcel before the music stops, there’s something horrible inside.