Someday Companies Will Take Security Seriously

But not today. Debit card fraud leaves Ally Bank customers, small stores reeling | Ars Technica

Anyone can have problems, and it looks like Ally Bank is elected this week. But then there are things companies do to shoot themselves in the foot.

First the bank doesn't know how the cancel a card.

On Monday, Grimes' canceled card was charged $1 by Langhofer's MyFamilyHandbook. Grimes called Ally to ask how this could have happened. A representative told Grimes that in "a different system," the charge was shown as being declined, Grimes said. As for how a charge on a canceled card happened, the Ally representative told Grimes it was "part of a recurring situation they're working on right now," Grimes said.

Then it is a problem just to communicate with the bank. Kevin (an Ally Bank Customer who works in financial services) had a problem.

Like others, Kevin was put off by a 90-minute wait time to report the charges. Two more charges arrived the next day for more than $350, but this time, Ally flagged them. Kevin, who works in financial services, said the whole experience was confusing. Verification texts and phone calls arrived from numbers he couldn't trace back to Ally; the links in Ally's fraud emails revealed confounding URLs without secure HTTPS addresses.

WHAT reason could ANY business, let alone a BANK, have for not using secure internet connections?

I know one reason: Executives. "You want us to spend money on what? Get lost! You Info Tech people are always complaining about something."

If I was an Ally Bank customer, I would be looking for a new bank.

Though Stripe - the card processing site in the middle of all of this - is also on the hook for some of the blame.

There is more, including how it is impacting one of the small online webstore owner - who was only ever trying to do the right thing, and got rolled over by the fraud juggernaught.