hackers

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last year, a hacker almost took $60,000 out of my account. thank buddha, the bank manager rescued my worthless corpse when she told me that i needed four forms of ID, and i didn't have that. otherwise, the hacker would've emptied out my checking account.

some articles claim that hackers are getting more and more sophisticated. hackers are great at artificial intelligence, computers, psychological manipulation, finances, and et cetera, and i am not. some articles claim that a Certified Financial Advisor, an FBI director, and a CIA director, and a lawyer, all got their $$$$ hacked away. i will never be as great @ Cybersecurity, as the FBI and CIA. sooner or later, a hacker will successfully take all my $$$$. i am autistic and have nobody to talk to and have zero common sense. i am easily tricked and i don't know how to verbally defend myself.

every time i get a phone call, text message, or email, i am afraid it is a hacker. hackers smart and i am not.

been watching some videos about the latest greatest scams. but nothing i do is good enough b/c hackers are getting better every day.

seriously considering squandering all my chump change. that way when the hacker successfully gets my $$$, it won't be that much.

anyone else feel the same way?

Don't squander but you should keep your money in different banks / investments.
I wouldn't recommend leaving it all in one institution.
It's not just scammers and hackers, but banks can go under.
Most banks will only insure your account up to about $50,000 anyway.

I keep my financial instruments separate. Current account, joint account, mortgage account, savings accounts, pension are all with different organisations. So are all my amenities - internet, cellphones, gas, electricity, water. And so are all my insurances; home, car and life.

This is less a protection against hacking and more a protection against corporate incompetence. It's happened twice in my life; (a) when a customer service drone at the credit card company pressed the wrong button, and instead of removing a temporary block on my card, cancelled it irrevocably - three days before Christmas; (b) when a bank gave me a car loan and forgot to credit it to my account, so when I tried to get cash out of an ATM it swallowed my card - the Friday night before a bank holiday. If I'd had all my money in one place on either of those occasions, I'd have been in trouble.

More than once, of course, I've had salespeople trying to badger me into 'consolidating' my finances. 'But... but... it might save you money', they entreat. So it might - and so might cancelling my home insurance, and I'm not going to do that either, for basically the same reason.

I keep an offline password manager. I never use the same password in more than one place. I use two-factor authentication wherever available. I keep myself educated in the latest scamming and phishing techniques. I never open email attachments from unknown senders, I never answer the phone to unknown numbers, I never click links from text messages. I don't use social media at all.

I check my various bank accounts every week or so, and my credit report on a regular basis, just to make sure that nothing has happened that I didn't know about.

Some people think this is autistic behaviour. It isn't. Smart NTs do it as well. 'Sensible precautions without fear' is the key.

today a popup came up and told me that my phone had a virus and it told me to click something and not close the window.

then i looked up on the internet that scam. yes it is a scam. s**t.

closed the window.

it's scary how easily hackers could take all of someone's $$.

I delete or every message claiming my device has been infected.

De que país eres? Si el banco no controla bien o roba, podría perjudicarse por publicaciones o por el boca a boca?
De donde adquieres la información de las últimas herramientas de los hakers?

Ask them for there number to call them back. If they cant do that you have your answer

It doesn't prove anything if they give you a number to call back.

Here is my rules:
1) Don't give anyone access to your computer no matter what their story is. If it needs to be worked on, ask around to find someone who is both local and trustworthy.
2) Never agree to anything based on a telephone call. No matter what they are selling or claiming, don't trust them.
3) Never agree to anything based on an e-mail. No matter what they are selling or claiming, don't trust them.
4) Tell them to send it by US mail. That way, if they are scammers, you can get the Postal Inspector's Office to investigate them.
5) Never ever believe anything on text messages without independently verifying that the message is correct. Don't use the number they give to check them out, use a number you already have independently from that.

Hang up on them. Don't give them a chance to convince you that they are on the level.

If they want you to download anything on the internet, refuse. It doesn't matter what reason they give you. It doesn't matter if they claim to be windows security, the US Marshall's, the IRS, US customs, or someone else. Hang up on them. None of those will ever call you on the telephone.

If it is the local bank, tell them you will call them right back and hang up. Then call the number on the back of your bank card.

If you get text messages telling you that someone is hacking your account, ignore them. Call whoever they purport to be on the number you already have and tell them.

If you have an iphone, there is a setting that will permit incoming calls only if the calling number is in your contact list. Even then be suspicious because scammers have no problems changing the caller id. Everyone not on your caller id goes to voice mail.

In short, use the telephones for things like talking to friends and family or maybe to order a pizza.

As for banking scams, one thing that might help is to avoid the big banks. Ask around and find a small local bank. The scammers are far more likely to pretend to be from a big bank than the First National Gopher Bank.

There are scams where they will get you to call "security" for your bank, credit card company, or something else. Don't do it because they can be really convincing.

Last edited by kokopelli on 03 Feb 2025, 12:07 am, edited 1 time in total.

One thing that can also help is to create individual e-mail accounts to give to every bank, credit card company, insurance company. Even better to do that for every on-line vendor you might buy from. Make the accounts long and random and unlikely to be something anyone else has ever used anywhere and do not ever give them to anyone else. For example, [email protected] -- something that they will never guess. Officially, you can have up to 64 characters in the username side, but not everyone can take that long a username -- I'd limit it to about 20 characters.

Then if they send you an e-mail to your regular account, you should strongly suspect it is a scam.

There is an exception, though. The local bank uses my old e-mail address for personal matters. My official e-mail address them is something similar to the above example, but that would be for official notifications. So when they send me an invitation to the annual hot dog lunch on the sidewalk next to the bank or to the annual Christmas open house, I have no reason to suspect those are scams.

By the way, at one western clothing store, I tried to give them an e-mail address of something like
[email protected], but that was too long for their computer systems to use. When the girl at the cash register tried to type that in she quickly got quite confused.

By the way, on many mail servers, it may be difficult to create multiple accounts. They will often, however, allow you to put hyphens, underscores, and periods when and where you want. So you could give different variations of the same address to different banks. For example, 7_944_926_123_535_897_932_384_626_433_8 ... xample.com, to First National Gopher Bank, 79_44_92_61_23_53_58_97_93_23_84_62_64_ ... xample.com to the Chocolate Bunny Credit Card Company, and
7944_9261_2353_5897_9323_8462_6433_8328 ... xample.com to the You Bet Your Life Insurance Company.

If you can use filtering to tag your e-mails with tags of your choice, you could even have anything coming in from one of those sites to a different e-mail address be tagged with a "WARNING" tag.

Naturally, when it comes to text messages on your cell phone, don't accept anything that comes in from any business or government at face value.