High-tech crooks using spyware are costing U.S. discount brokerages millions of dollars to repay clients who have been victimized by fraud, the brokerages said in recent days. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission warned earlier this month that scammers were hijacking online brokerage accounts using spyware and operating from remote locations. TD Ameritrade has said that it cost $4M in their third quarter from customers whose accounts had been hacked. Harder hit was rival E*Trade Financial Corp., which last week said its fraud losses ballooned by $18 million in the third quarter from swindlers who stole clients’ identities and manipulated their accounts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
TD Ameritrade Chief Executive Joseph Moglia told Reuters that all those who stole clients’ identities did so by using public computers rather than hacking into the Omaha, Nebraska-based company’s internal systems. Moglia blamed the share price fall on a cut on its projections for 2007 earnings.<\/p>\n
Both E*Trade and TD Ameritrade said they are working with investigators at the SEC, U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies to crack down on the scammers.<\/p>\n
In many of the schemes outlined recently by SEC officials, crooks will load a victim’s computer or a public PC with a spy program to monitor a user’s activities and capture vital information, such as account numbers and passwords. Once inside, the thief may sell off an account’s portfolio and take the proceeds. Or electronically hijacked accounts may be used for “pump-and-dump” schemes to manipulate stock prices for profit, SEC officials have said.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/nm\/20061025\/tc_nm\/financial_discountbrokerages_fraud_dc<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-financial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2847,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions\/2847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}