This past month, my husband’s identity was stolen and my access to our bank account was hacked. In my husband’s case a credit card was opened in his name. In my case my online bank user name, password and PIN was used to raise credit limits and then steal over $3,000 from our checking account.
Our bank took care of the matter, but what was problematic was just how robbers got access to my own personal online access information. The only thing we can think of is that I was using mobile banking features and may have accessed my bank while I was connected away from my home base.
As a result, here are the things that I have done to improve my smartphone security.
1. My entire family now uses on their mobile devices face or voice recognition biometrics to access our most important bank. For our other bank, we use two step verification. All family members use two step verification via text messages to smartphones to access bank accounts online through desktops.
2. My entire family now has withdrawal, deposit and transaction alerts set up for banking, savings accounts, and credit cards. The focus is to catch robbers early before too much damage has been done.
3. I personally am using NordVPN which ia a subscription base security tool for my smartphone that encrypts my communication on mobile data or when I am connected to any Wi-Fi hotspots out of my office. This will be especially important to me as I will be traveling in the months to come and this secure tunnel will allow me to encrypt data I exchange on the internet, geomask my location as well as to prevent eavesdroppers from snatching my user names and passwords.
Stay safe when you are online with your smartphone and encourage your family members to embrace new levels of mobile security to prevent the headaches that happened to us.