On 05/08/2011 20:58, Christina Websell wrote:
wrote in message
...
On Thu, 4 Aug 2011 22:25:59 +0100, "Christina Websell"
wrote:


"Janet wrote in message
...
In , Christina Websell
writes
you cannot discover you suddenly have an
account at Lloyds bank if you know you haven't


Oh what a shame especially if there was a nice balance in there

Exactly!
If anyone opened a bank account in my name I would grab the money out of
there ;-) It would serve them right.

What would you do if you found you had a very large overdraft in the
account?
--

It's not likely to happen, my bank are up to speed on security, I have to
take my passport with me to go there in person.
I have to know my mothers maiden name and where I spent my honeymoon to
touch my account. They are unlikely to set up another one for me if I
cannot provide these security checks.

I hope those are not your actual security checks! Mothers maiden name,
date and place of birth are almost trivial to obtain these days. Copies
of birth or marriage certificates too and plenty of places will take
them as proof of ID (event though they shouldn't). Cost would be about
£20 to find that info if you were being targeted for fraud.

Mothers maiden name is completely useless as a security question.

Having disclosed what the other somewhat more robust test is in a public
forum you really ought to consider changing it to something else. And
definitely change you mothers maiden name to a favourite plant, colour,
car, plane or something.

Same with passwords include upper and lower case letters, numbers and at
least one symbol. Do not use words and never do obvious swaps like S/5
I/l/1 Z/2 O/0 they are amongst the first things a dictionary based
attacker will try (as is your phone no & car registration).

Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they are not all out to get you!

Regards,
Martin Brown