Financial Convenience vs FRAUD Prevention

Quick Summary: We lock up our house, car, gun, and chainsaws or lawnmowers to prevent theft, or accidents by children, so why put your financial information out there in public places where it can easily be stolen? Are we locking things up “securely” but leaving the key under the doormat? Why put your bank information in a password manager, and leave the password manager accessible?

The securest method of preventing fraud or scams is to keep transactions dissociated from each other.

Use a Firewall Banking Card

A firewall is a thick unburnable wall that divides a building into parts — if one part of the building burns, the firewall largely stops the other part of the building from burning. In electronics, a Network Firewall stops illicit communication between parts of your network. If it is a (cheap) software firewall on the computer, then it does its best to stop a virus in one part of the computer networking from getting to the other part of computer network or other devices on the network. (Not the best use of firewalls! It is like a Mom trying to keep one child with the pox from spreading it to the other children in the same house. ) A Firewall Banking Card, therefore, is a bank card that is used between the main banking account and outside vendors. It is a prepaid card, or a separate dedicated bank account with funds deliberately limited for ad hoc purchases. (Credit line cards are discouraged as they pose high personal liability.)

Separate Monthly Bills from Ad Hoc Online Purchases

The typical scenario is a person has a primary bank account into which they deposit their source of income — payroll checks, or monthly social security payments. The money in that account is critical for paying basic living utility bills, rent or mortgages. If someone were to steal the money from this account, it creates major havoc: In many cases checks begin to bounce and rack up huge check-return fees. IT IS MUCH TOO DANGEROUS to give out banking account numbers of this primary bank account over the Internet to people and vendors you cannot know.

The solution: Use a different banking card on a different account to do online purchasing. This “different” card, called the Firewall Card, is a way to prevent leaked online card transaction information from getting to the primary source of income in the main banking account.

Reserve Primary Bank for Primary Business

The primary bank account must be reserved to do banking with critical and usually highly regulated “safer” companies like the mortgage company, the electric company, the city water bill, and so on. Leave all smaller transactions, especially ones done over the Internet, to the Firewall Card Account. We recommend cash-based prepaid cards, because credit cards with credit lines have similar liability as your primary bank account. Instead, put a limited amount of money on the firewall card, by manually depositing cash to it. A slightly less secure, but much more convenient method is to use the primary banking debit card to charge money for deposit into the firewall card, which does not require bank routing information to be shared. Cash App permits this free of charge. Paypal and Venmo have similar services.

Other alternatives include over-the-counter prepaid Visa cards, or a secondary bank account (still risky due to possibility of overdrafts) dedicated for use only for smaller purchase transactions. Periodically or with a good mobile banking app, money can be moved from the primary bank “income source account” to the secondary bank “purchases account.” Should the “purchase account” get compromised, at most the limited amount placed in it might be compromised, meanwhile, the primary account (paying out rent, electric, etc, bills) is still safe; a much lower risk of bouncing a mortgage payment!

Expand the Firewall Concept to Other Areas

This concept of firewalls can be extended to browsing the Internet. Some web sites are deemed “safe” and other websites have higher risks. For example it is a known fact that certain gaming sites are associated with gambling sites, which in turn associate with immoral activity, which in turn associate with illegal activity. In a typical scenario, a individual uses their primary web browser to logon to check their email, using the same browser to check their bank statement, and then that same browser to login for entertainment. While playing a game, an advertisement appears to try out a new casino app, and it is unintentionally (or intentionally) permitted to run. The app launches and merely reads the browser history, for instance, to determine the person’s primary email and bank, and might know the person’s name from the email and entertainment accounts. Seeing a grand opportunity for fraud, the app triggers a “You have a virus” message and asks that a phone number be called to resolve it. STOP. STOP! STOP!! STOP!!!! FREEZE! DON’T MOVE!!!!!!!! It is a scam. The thief is already inside the living room enjoying a cup of coffee slipping your jewrely in his pockets! Do an immediate shutdown: Try Alt-F4 repeatedly, or Ctrl-Alt-Del to Shutdown, or if you cannot get a shutdown message, finally hold the power button down 20 seconds to do a hard power off of the system.

A Firewall Browser

The concept is straight-forward (if you read above): Instead of using the primary browser to do EVERYTHING — reserve a browser to do primary critical banking business, with “safe” sites that are well known. Install a separate browser to do all other types of browsing, like playing games. There are dozens of different web browsers available for phones, and quite a few for desktop and laptop computers. Even a single application, such as Firefox or Chrome, has the ability to use different profiles for different purposes. Using profiles is not quite as safe as using an entirely different application, but it can be effective to block illicit applications or website scripting from reading past browsing habits. This method firewalls one type of browsing, like banking business, from other types of browsing, like recreational websites.