SMS Phishing and Cardless ATM = Profit
This reinforces my opinion that we&#x27;re way overdue for teaching the general public enough knowledge about safe computing to be able to spot and avoid these and other kinds of fraud. It&#x27;s a really important life skill that should probably be addressed in school as it&#x27;s easily costing the global economy billions and billions.<p>When I was working Customer Service for Blizzard Europe, I anecdotally figure that by around 2010, about half of CS cases were in regards to customers having been victims of their account being compromised and cleaned out by gold sellers.<p>In all cases it was the &quot;fault&quot; of the customer. While Blizzard did have a credential DB compromise at some point (which they disclosed), the passwords were hashed such that it was practically impossible that any passwords were determined before they did a force password reset on the affected accounts.<p>Customer accounts were most commonly compromised due to one of the following reasons: fell for phishing scams (probably most common); had credentials shared with an unrelated but compromised web site; had some sort of credential stealing trojan on their computer; shared credentials with a friend&#x2F;relative who fell for any of the earlier mentioned causes.<p>Back in 2010, Blizzard easily spent EUR 1M <i>monthly</i> (in Europe alone) on Customer Service and if half of that was dealing with compromised accounts (for a non-financial institution), we can only imagine how much money gets lost globally due to what is essentially a poor public education problem in regards to safe computing.<p>Blizzard has offered 2FA since before 2010, but most people wouldn&#x27;t consider it unless they or someone they know had been compromised, it&#x27;s pretty much the same as people only seeing the value of using things like seat belts&#x2F;car seats&#x2F;condoms after they personally witness an incident. I think the average person has this attitude that bad things only happen to _other_ people, until it happens to them personally.<p>There was also often enough this attitude of &quot;I don&#x27;t understand why they decided to hack _me_&quot; which also shows general misunderstanding of the very non-personal nature of this &quot;industry&quot; in that bad actors are merely throwing out the biggest nets they can, hoping to catch as much as possible. It&#x27;s like a fish naively wondering why a commercial fishing boat decided to catch them in particular.<p>I acknowledge that saying this is the &quot;fault&quot; of the customer seems unfair, but I left school close to 20 years ago and I have never fallen for a phishing scam or managed to land up with malware on my computer. While the fault does ultimately lie with the bad actors, the fact is that while material things (such as money, or food) are important, there will always be bad actors. So as a society we need to strive to keep their success rate as low as possible to prevent their &quot;industries&quot; from flourishing at the expense of the rest of society.