Criminals Steal Account Numbers Using One-Cent Transfers

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,681030,00.html

In Germany (as well as America), it is common practice to simply pay bills online: you go to your bank's website, click a couple buttons, and boom, you're done. Money is taken into and out of bank accounts every moment of every day, and scammers have found a new way to exploit this convenience once again. The newest scam on German interwebs is for a scammer to take a few Euros (remember, one Euro is still 100 cents) and attempt to transfer one cent to any number of randomly-generated account numbers. Most of these generated numbers come back as nonexistent, of course, but when a transfer does manage to go through, the scammer knows he's hit a big, fat paycheck. They use the account numbers that they have acquired and start making withdrawals. Sometimes the scammer will simply wipe the account, but smarter scammers only take a little bit at a time. The online banking system does not have a checkpoint to see whether the person making the withdrawal is actually the account holder, so the responsibility of finding out if someone is sapping your account is the solely that of the account holder.

Shocking as this all is, it is my understanding that we're safe from this type of scam in the US. The way this scam works is through a loophole in a German law that passed last year, which helps money travel faster because "banks are no longer required to check if the name and account number on a transfer slip match." In short, the criminal can just make up a name and take money with little risk on their part. Fortunately for consumers, one can cancel a fraudulent transfer up to 13 months after it happens, so as long as they keep close tabs on their bank records, they will more than likely be safe. This doesn't bode so well for the average Joe (or maybe it's Josef in Germany) who doesn't religiously watch their online banking, however. Despite this not being a problem in America yet, I think the moral of the story is that we should all keep our hard-earned dough under constant surveillance, because a good scammer can find ways to steal that dough in ways we would have never thought of before.