A rash of home foreclosures and abandoned dwellings had already taken its toll on the tax revenue for the Village of Summit, a town of 10,000 just outside Chicago. Then, in March, computer crooks broke into the town’s online bank account, making off with nearly $100,000.
One bit of criticism I’ve heard about my stories on small businesses losing their shirts over online banking fraud is that I don’t often enough point out what banks and customers should be doing differently to lessen the chance of suffering one of these incidents. As it happens, a source of mine was recently at a conference where one of the key speakers was a senior official from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the main banking industry regulators.
Organized computer criminals yanked more than $200,000 out of the online bank accounts of a Missouri dental practice this month, in yet another attack that exposes the risks that small- to mid-sized organizations face in banking online.
An Arkansas public water utility and a New Jersey town are the latest victims of an organized cyber crime gang that is stealing tens of millions of dollars from small to mid-sized organizations via online bank theft. On Thursday, officials… Read More »
Over the past nine months, I have spent a huge amount of time investigating and detailing the plight of dozens of small businesses that have had their bank accounts cleaned out by organized criminals. One of the most frequent questions I get from readers and from my journalist peers is, “How many of these stories are you going to tell?” The answer is simple: As many as I can verify. The reason is just as plain: I’m finding that most small business owners have no clue about the threat they face or the liability they assume when banking online.
Computer crooks stole more than $200,000 from an auto body shop in Ohio last month in a brazen online robbery. The attack is yet another example of how thieves are using malicious software to bypass bank security technologies that are… Read More »
Organized cyber criminals stole more than $25 million from small to mid-sized businesses in brazen e-banking heists in the 3rd quarter of 2009 alone, federal regulators said last week. In contrast, traditional stick-up artists hauled less than $9.5 million out of U.S. banks over that same time period last year.
In December, I wrote about how a Louisiana electronics testing firm was suing its bank, Capital One, to recover the losses after cyber thieves broke in and stole nearly $100,000. It looks like another small firm in that state that… Read More »
Prodded by incessant reports of small- to mid-sized business losing millions of dollars at the hands of organized cyber criminals, federal regulators may soon outline more stringent steps that commercial banks need to take to protect business customers from online… Read More »
A New York marketing firm that as recently as two weeks ago was preparing to be acquired now is facing bankruptcy from a computer virus infection that cost the company more than $164,000. Karen McCarthy, owner of Merrick, N.Y. based… Read More »
