by Charles Miller

In my professional capacity I have had a chance to observe firsthand how email providers and financial institutions have greatly improved their security procedures, especially in recent months. In the process of helping many other people recover access to their email or bank accounts I have learned what to anticipate regarding online security, and it is getting incrementally tighter.

A friend of mine misplaced his credit card and I assisted him reporting this to his bank. There were no fraudulent transactions made using the card, so no problem simply requesting a replacement card with a new number. Unseen by my friend, this put in motion a sequence of events I was more prepared to recognize having been through all of this before with others.

Because he had lost one card, his bank was on heightened alert for unauthorized transactions. My friend received a phone call from his bank requesting he verify some charges to his new card. The bank employee spoke with a thick accent resulting in the customer not being able to understand the pronunciation of one of the charges to the new credit card. When he said he did not recognize that name, the bank believed there had been an unauthorized charge so they again cancelled his credit card and sent him yet another new one.

I anticipated that having "lost" two credit cards in the same month that my friend would now be subject to greater scrutiny; so I was not surprised when he could not log into his bank online. The bank's website would not accept the password he knew to be correct, so it was necessary to complete the process of resetting the password. This required phoning the bank to speak to someone to whom he could provide enough personal details to verify his identity. Then back online the website now asked for more information it had never before required; this being the creation of not one but three secret questions such as "What was the name of first girlfriend from high school?" and etcetera.

The bank was obviously ratcheting up the level of security they require for my friend's account due to the two "lost" cards. The bank started to encourage my friend to download and install an app on his smart phone, but his phone was a model too old to support the app. Thankfully for now they are not making the use of the app obligatory. Many banks now want to use the features available on smart phones, such as GPS location data, the camera, etc. for "better security."

Above, I wrote "thankfully" because another friend who had been ordering groceries and other products online using his computer was suddenly required to download the vendor's app to his smart phone and use that instead. The problem he encountered was that the app required using the phone's camera for facial recognition… and it refused to recognize him. Eventually he ascertained that if he changed the lighting by standing outside on his patio in the sunlight that the camera would eventually recognize him. That worked, but now he has to worry that if we have a week or two of cloudy weather he will not be able to order groceries before he goes hungry.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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