Online Brokerage Accounts: What You Can Do to Safeguard Your Money and Your Personal Information
- How to protect yourself online
- How to know if your identity has been stolen
- Additional resources to help you be safe online
Let’s hope this never happens to you: You have a few free minutes so you decide to go online to check your brokerage account information. Your account balance is much lower than you expect – and you know that, at least for today, neither the market nor any of your securities fell in value. You see that there were several wire transfers of money from your account to an outside checking account. But you never authorized those transactions – instead, an identity thief did, and that thief has now stolen your cash as well as your personal information.
Like many investors, you may enjoy some of the conveniences of an online brokerage account, like checking your brokerage account information at any time of day or night, buying and selling securities, or even transferring money between your brokerage account and another account. But if you don’t take steps to protect your personal information when you go online, you could be telling your own story of identity theft.
How Online Identity Theft Can Happen
Many identity thieves use malicious software programs to attack vulnerable computers of online users. These software programs can monitor your computer activity and send information back to the thief’s computer. Sometimes, these programs will log your key strokes, which allows identity thieves to easily obtain username and password information for any of your online accounts, including your brokerage account.
Other identity thieves “phish” for your personal information. “Phishing” involves the use of fraudulent emails and copy-cat websites to trick you into revealing valuable personal information – such as your account number, your social security number, and the username and password information you use when accessing your account. Sometimes fraudsters will use phishing scams to try to get you to download keystroke logging or other malicious software programs unsuspectingly.
But not all identity thieves have gone “high tech.” Many still use less sophisticated ways of stealing your personal information, such as looking over your shoulder when you’re typing sensitive information or searching through your trash for confidential account information.
