Have got your account in payment system hacked? What to do, how to protect yourself?

Like any other robbery, news about hacking of the account comes suddenly, causing usually a shock and a question: what to do? Firstly, let’s agree that you will not make a panic and will do your best to understand what to do next, to evaluate your possibilities to return funds and what to do with your hacked account as a whole?

So, as soon as you discover a hacked account and loss of the funds, you should immediately contact the Support. Let’s call your message – the first letter. You should understand that you have no time to describe the details. You have a chance that your money has not been withdrawn yet and this means that you should write a quick letter containing account number, short description of the situation and a request to block the account. The letter should be sent from the e-mail used to register the account. Of course, such a letter will not be convincing for the support of payment system however it will make them to consider your account and even may be to block it temporarily to obtain more specific information.

The next step you should take is to clear up the situation and to prepare materials to send the second letter which should be more motivated and supported with a number of proofs and evidences which can be useful for the support team of the payment system. The letter shoul contain the following things:

- Screenshot of the transaction made by the fraudsters.
- Screenshot of the history of transactions in your account
- Mention the browser you use
- Specify the time of your last enter into account

Having sent the letter you should wait for the reply from the customer support. Simultaneously you may discuss your problem on big forums. There were some cases when a strong response in online community stimulated the payment systems to return funds to the victim. However more likely the situation will be as follows: the payment system will write you about the fact of sending funds by the fraudsters to the account of some online exchanger, or will tell you the account number in another payment system which was used by the fraudsters to send your money into.

From this situation with the theft of funds one should get a great experience and draw conclusions for the whole life about how to use his/her account in any payment system in order not to become robbed. To understand how to build a defense against the fraudsters, try to look at the security of your account through the eyes of the fraudsters

Firstly you should understand that you may unintentionally provide the swindlers with the access details, otherwise the information can be taken from other places. As for the cases when people themselves inadvertently provide information to access, it should be said that each account owner in the payment system should understand that none of the payment system will ask you to send the details to access your account. Also one should not ignore such important issue as entering the site of the payment system. Type the name of the payment system in the address bar and never use the ready made links. Never use the links sent to you by other people, even if you have received it by mail and the e-mail address of the sender is coincide with the usual address of the support department. Beware of phishing since the technologies of today enable the fraudsters to replace the links and to redirect the users to the fraudulent sites in order to steal their private details used to access the account.

As for the access to your account by means of the technologies, here one should understand that again, everything is in his/her hands. Everything is quite simple: all viruses, Trojans, key loggers, spywares and other stuff get into our computers while using the Internet. Henceforth if you use the e-currency on the absolutely empty computer with the only installed software – antivirus, and if you visit no sites except the site of payment system, the probability you’re your account will be hacked tends to 0. Therefore, it makes sense to have a separate netbook to use payment system, or install a virtual machine and use it for financial transactions only.

One more important issue in the protection of the account is a responsible approach to passwords. It should have a set of passwords, where the length of each of them exceeds 15-20 characters. You should register a separate e-mail for each account in the payment system to be used for that payment processor only. Passwords for the e-mails, for accounts in the payment system and for other elements of protection should differ.

Try your best to change the passwords as frequently as it is possible. Regular change of the passwords decrease the risk of the account hacking and let you be calm for your account.

Since we are talking about money do not be lazy to enable all possible security tools offered by payment systems to protect your funds.

And finally, if you feel that your computer is running weird lately, try to avoid entering your accounts in payment systems. Format the system and then resume use of your e-finance. Formatting will not only save you from the risks but also result in a quick work on a fresh installed version of Windows.

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