Horror of Hackers & How to Halt Them

It’s happened to you or someone you know.
 
I remember when my friend’s back account got hacked. She found a suspicious airline charge on her bank statement. It overdrew her account. She spent days on the phone with representatives from her bank stating that she had no travel plans and did purchase the plane tickets. Through several days where she spent hours with various representatives on the phone, who asked her many things to make sure she wasn’t lying, increasing her frustration - one of the questions she was asked, “Did you receive any emails asking for your personal information?” She had. She had received a fraudulent email, pretending to be from her bank asking her to verify her social security and all her contact information, along with the password to her online banking. The bank representative told her, “We would never ask for that information through an email.”
 
Long story short, after many weeks of her dealing with her bank, a slew of representatives, filing and re-filing a fraud complaint, she finally got her money back that was stolen from her.
 
The lesson she learned (and I learned from her going through it)?
 

1. Your bank will never ask you to verify your personal information over the phone and especially not through email.

 
I went through and gathered some other horror stories of other types of accounts being hacked and PayPal seems to have an entire website (not affiliated with the actual company, PayPal) dedicated to these type of basic consumer personal complaints, litigations, scam and virus alerts. You can find them at AboutPayPal.org.
 
If you play poker online, you’re familiar with the idea of how you can buy-in with real money the way you would at a real table and basically play win virtual chips or credits that mean real dollars if you ever cashed out your account. There’s been a high risk of these types of accounts being hacked into and stealing sometimes hundreds even thousands of dollars. Read this article on how you can safeguard your online poker account.
 
Another common account that is often hacked is your personal email. This can be devastating because it can gain access not only to your email account, but to all the social networking sites, blogging services and your online shopping accounts that your email is linked to. Which means they can spam everyone in your address book, everyone through your social networking site, they can get account and payment information from your online shopping – think of the carnage. Read this helpful article of how you can regain control if this happens to you. 
 
With any situation where your things are stolen, regardless if it’s your iPod, your identity, money out of your wallet, or money out of your PayPal account, it all makes you feel completely helpless. But thankfully in the internet world there are ways in which we can protect ourselves against such maliciousness. Read this article for the ten tips on how to arm your computer against spyware, viruses and hackers.