The scare stories in the media concern incredibly stupid people who enter their bank details into rougue emails (phishing emails, see below). Some idiots even give bank details to crooks who telephone pretending they are bank officials or the police. The most common cause of identity fraud, apart from phishing, results from people failing to shred vital documents such as bills and bank statements.
Interest rates: All banks offer excellent interest rates for internet accounts. Most have online current accounts which pay high interest.
Advantages of Internet banking:
You can: check your account at anytime to ensure that payments have been
made. You can check frequently to see if unauthorised payments are being
made. You can print a statement, pay bills,
transfer money from one account to another, and set up a new account such as
online savings.
Warning: Nearly all internet accounts work well on dial-up, however Northern Rock's internet account is written in Java code and is hopelessly slow on dial-up. You will need a fast broadband service to use Northern Rock.
Bogus PayPal emails: If you have a PayPal account you will occasionally receive an email from PayPal. Genuine PayPal emails will always greet you with your name or the name of your business. They will never ask you for bank or personal details. Bogus PayPal emails will greet you with Dear PayPal Member or something similar and will be phishing for personal information.
Phishing: spam emails purporting to be from banks and building societies are scams called phishing
(fishing for bank details). Kill them (hold down Shift and tap the
Delete key).
Genuine emails from your bank or building society NEVER ask you for
personal or financial details.
Warning: If you should accidentally open a phishing email the worst possible thing you can do is to click the unsubscribe link or reply to the email. If you do, you will be classified as an easy target by spammers. You will then be inundated with vastly increased quantities of spam for ever.
The padlock and the s indicate that everything you type in from now on will be encoded and will be entirely safe. Now enter your bank details and follow the instructions on the screen. You may be asked to choose a password. Make a careful note of the password, or you may be sent one in the post. Then enter the requested security details. These will be things that only you will know so that no one else can access your online bank account.
You will be asked to give a memorable word that only you would know about.
When you log on to the bank account in the future you will be asked to give two or three characters from the memorable word, for example:
If your memorable word was eden1997, you might be asked to select the 2nd, 4th and 8th character from drop down menus. These characters would be d, n, and 7.
Most banks also send you a letter containing an ID number.
A criminal would not be able to access your bank account unless he knows 4 bits of secret information. These are:
Your bank account number
Your secret ID number
Your secret password
Your secret memorable word.
One thing you should always do after accessing your account is log off. This safely cuts off any connection between your computer and the bank. Look for the log off words or button, usually found at the bottom of the bank’s web page. This is particularly important if you access your account in a public place.
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