andrel wrote:
> Same sort of procedure?

They're trusting the phone company to be harder to pervert than your 
password. They're trusting that an SMS sent to you is more likely to go to 
you than the bad guy breaking in.

>> I think both google and facebook allow that too, but that's to cut 
>> down on spam, or some such.
> 
> How does that work?

It's been a while, but I think it involves not having to enter a captcha 
once you do this once with your cell phone. I.e., you've proven you're a 
person (because obviously they're not going to let 300 accounts use the same 
cell phone number), so you don't have to reconfirm that this account is a 
real person.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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On 6-10-2009 0:20, Darren New wrote:
> andrel wrote:
>> Same sort of procedure?
> 
> They're trusting the phone company to be harder to pervert than your 
> password. They're trusting that an SMS sent to you is more likely to go 
> to you than the bad guy breaking in.

Or at least that a bad guy needs to steal your phone *and* to hack your 
account. Doing both in a short timespan is significantly less likely 
than one of them.

> 
>>> I think both google and facebook allow that too, but that's to cut 
>>> down on spam, or some such.
>>
>> How does that work?
> 
> It's been a while, but I think it involves not having to enter a captcha 
> once you do this once with your cell phone. I.e., you've proven you're a 
> person (because obviously they're not going to let 300 accounts use the 
> same cell phone number), so you don't have to reconfirm that this 
> account is a real person.

Makes sense.

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>  I don't really understand why giving your bank details to someone would
> be in any way dangerous. It's not like they could withdraw money by simply
> knowing your account number.

In Germany you can buy stuff with just that info on most websites - see 
attached screenshot of the amazon.de payment page.  The three boxes I 
highlighted are to enter your account number, bank code and account name.

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Attachments:
Download 'amazon de payment.png' (89 KB)

Preview of image 'amazon de payment.png'

scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> [-- text/plain, encoding 7bit, charset: Windows-1252, 9 lines --]

> >  I don't really understand why giving your bank details to someone would
> > be in any way dangerous. It's not like they could withdraw money by simply
> > knowing your account number.

> In Germany you can buy stuff with just that info on most websites - see 
> attached screenshot of the amazon.de payment page.  The three boxes I 
> highlighted are to enter your account number, bank code and account name.

  How can any bank in the world accept a transfer which a third-party is
requesting, who only has the account number? That sounds absolutely crazy.
People could simply try random account numbers to see if they get lucky.

  I understand why that's a necessity with credit cards, but not directly
with bank accounts.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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>  How can any bank in the world accept a transfer which a third-party is
> requesting, who only has the account number? That sounds absolutely crazy.
> People could simply try random account numbers to see if they get lucky.

Presumably you need the account name, number and bank code to all match 
though, it would be almost impossible to guess those unless you got the data 
somehow.  But still it seems crazy to me, it's not exactly hard to get such 
information.

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"scott" <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> >  How can any bank in the world accept a transfer which a third-party is
> > requesting, who only has the account number? That sounds absolutely crazy.
> > People could simply try random account numbers to see if they get lucky.
>
> Presumably you need the account name, number and bank code to all match
> though, it would be almost impossible to guess those unless you got the data
> somehow.  But still it seems crazy to me, it's not exactly hard to get such
> information.

Well, it's not really that bad. If you find an illegal transaction of this type
on your account you can easily cancel it within I think it's two weeks.

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>> Presumably you need the account name, number and bank code to all match
>> though, it would be almost impossible to guess those unless you got the 
>> data
>> somehow.  But still it seems crazy to me, it's not exactly hard to get 
>> such
>> information.
>
> Well, it's not really that bad. If you find an illegal transaction of this 
> type
> on your account you can easily cancel it within I think it's two weeks.

Only two weeks? I never knew it was that short, I will have to make sure I 
check my online banking more regularly in future!

Anyway, do you know who picks up the cost for this - is it the bank or the 
website?

But still, I'm surprised more criminals don't totally abuse this system 
enough for it to get changed.

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