When the Police Rip You Off

Sometimes police get caught stealing drugs and drug money.

What if your friendly neighbor anti-virus or anti-malware program is actually a key logger sending your banking and brokerage information to thieves in Bulgaria? How would you know? What should you do?

Talk it over with your bank and/or brokerage firm. Try to set some guidelines on who may take money out of your account and under what circumstances that money can be taken. One rule that would be nice to put into place is: always verify the physical location of the institution that is asking for the money. If it is outside of the country, any automated requests should be denied. If you are going to send your money to Nigerian bank scammers, you should have to do that in person.

It is tempting to try to do everything on the cheap or for free but if it turned out that free anti-malware program you put on your hard drive was indeed a key logger stealing your passwords who are you going to sue? The 15-year-old kid in Lichtenstein who coded it? Even if you could find him and get the various intervening governments involved to take you seriously, some adult has that money and is long gone. They left the kid to hold the bag for an iPod and a bag of chips.

I am not saying that there are no thieves in mainline companies but at least you have some recourse if some of their employees are trying to do a cyber break in and steal your cash.

Still if everyone everywhere gets hit you may still be SOL. They don't have enough money to pay back everybody.

So again talk your digital asset manager and your cyber cash dealer. Try and limit the amount of money that can be removed from your account at any one time and during any one day. If you could limit the amount of cash to say no more than 10% a day unless you come in and approve it in person, you may not be worth stealing from.

If possible, only deal with reputable people. One way to figure out who is reputable and who isn't might be if you can find out whether or not companies like PayPal have verified the people you are dealing with. Someone who has a verified physical address, credit card and bank account is far less likely to be a thief. If you look long and hard enough you will find a thief who has all that but the likelihood should be vanishingly small.

Make sure you get alerted whenever money is removed from your account.

Change your passwords early and often. If you dump all your free anti-virus software and buy some commercial products, that would probably be a good time to change all your bank and brokerage firm passwords.

If your system slows down for no apparent reason you should at least be curious if some key logger is busy sending your goodies out to Outer Bigjokestan.

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