AI threat to your bank account.

Sunset said:
Good idea, but I'd say do it monthly so it's nearly current, plus it forces a person to see their account each month.
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I reconcile all statements from all accounts anyway. Statements are monthly.
 
I hadn't done the ol' file of PDFs for each account for a while. Just completed it.

For us and accounts that I manage for aunt and uncle 1, aunt and uncle 2, neanderthal friend and the family summer home there were 22 files/accounts in all across 5 financial institutions (Schwab, Fidelity and a few banks).

I can't imagine the pile of paper that I would have if I printed them all.

I think I need to create an AI routine to go out and fetch them each month and put them in the proper folders. What do your think? What could go wrong?
 
gauss said:
But with most weapons, once the genie is "out of the bottle" she rarely goes back in.

-gauss
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It’s naive to think other countries as well as organized crime will not develop their own Mythos type of software.
Banning it would simply be like disarming oneself while your enemies were stockpiling more weapons. Mythos finds errors that are there already. It can be used to identify these errors and in some cases fix them. Banning it would not be smart.
 
Not sure having a pdf file would help if a bad actor concocts some way to empty your account that looks like a legit authorized action. Let’s say they close your account with instruction to send proceeds to CryptoBro LLC. Not saying it’s a bad idea but I don’t believe any legit financial institution won’t be able to replicate recent statements.
 
AudiDudi said:
Seems it can happen: Claude-powered AI agent’s confession after deleting a firm’s entire database: ‘I violated every principle I was given’

It only took 9 seconds for an AI coding agent gone wrong to delete a company's production database and its backups.
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Backup should never be that vulnerable. They should be off line and air-gapped in some way. Multiple copies are saved not just the lack backup. What is described above is just lousy security. The online equivalent of hiding a duplicate key to the front door the backyard garden shed.
 
jazz4cash said:
Not sure having a pdf file would help if a bad actor concocts some way to empty your account that looks like a legit authorized action. Let’s say they close your account with instruction to send proceeds to CryptoBro LLC. Not saying it’s a bad idea but I don’t believe any legit financial institution won’t be able to replicate recent statements.
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While I think it is highly unlikely, I'm more concerned with the financial institution getting hacked and losing all records like in the example upstream in this thread. In the event that the financial institution had no records then I would have my saved statements as evidence that I had an account there and on x date what it had in it.
 
pb4uski said:
I hadn't done the ol' file of PDFs for each account for a while. Just completed it.
....
I can't imagine the pile of paper that I would have if I printed them all.
....
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I just did the same, saved all the PDF's that I had been lazily not getting since the beginning of this year !
 
If a financial institution has no records, I suspect lots of people will show up with multi-billion-dollar paper statements they printed themselves.
 
For those of you that save your current monthly statements to pdf, do you then delete the prior months and only save the current one?
 
I don’t worry so much about a place like Fidelity losing all their records as much as I fear a wiping out of my account by a bad actor. I think vs losing all their records, they’re probably more susceptible to a ransomware attack where all their records are held hostage. In that case, I suspect they’d pay the ransom if their IT department couldn’t get them clear in very short order. On the other hand, how much effort do you think they’re going to expend to make me whole from fraud, especially if it looks like a legitimate transaction to them?
 
Sunset said:
No need, as the space taken is very small. Besides it is a record, so why not keep it.
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Yes, showing transactions, month to month or quarter to quarter would go a long way toward "proving" that the paper w*rk is valid.
 
Sunset said:
No need, as the space taken is very small. Besides it is a record, so why not keep it.
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Exactly. PDF files are tiny and we have plenty of large drives. Note we don’t rely on cloud backups. Cloud backups are just for convenience/temporary.
 
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GrayHare said:
If a bank's customer web access portal is the only weak spot, and it don't think it is, the simple solution is to delete your online access to accounts. I suspect the bigger threat exists at the bank/brokerage system level, something to which ordinary customers like us do not have access.
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I think AI could scrape enough data about anyone to establish new online access in the user's name. I'd rather have online access to I can check account balances in real time.
 
Chuckanut said:
Backup should never be that vulnerable. They should be off line and air-gapped in some way. Multiple copies are saved not just the lack backup. What is described above is just lousy security. The online equivalent of hiding a duplicate key to the front door the backyard garden shed.
Click to expand...

pb4uski said:
While I think it is highly unlikely, I'm more concerned with the financial institution getting hacked and losing all records like in the example upstream in this thread. In the event that the financial institution had no records then I would have my saved statements as evidence that I had an account there and on x date what it had in it.
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I did not read the article.

I worked in IT for a large financial institution. The system I supported backed up important files on various schedules depending upon the frequency of the various jobs that ran that system. I have no doubt the other dozens of systems in the corporation had to do the same thing as this was required. We shipped the backups off site daily. We were required to set up disaster recovery jobs in my and all the other systems and periodically we had to test that to insure the backups recovered critical data, ran the system through the various time permutations (daily, twice a week, weekend, mid month, Xth workday of the month, monthly, quarterly and year end) correctly.

I retired in 2007 and I seriously doubt that system exists today as it was built in 1982 but my point is a large corporation has to protect itself and it's data. I have no doubts that brokerages like Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab, et al do the same thing whether it is mandated by the SEC or whomever or just a CYA. I have month end hard copies of all my accounts at the 1 institution I use dating back 20 or 25 years.
 
For those of you who backup your statements, are you backing up at the level in which every holding is shown for each sub-account?
 
Like Graybeard states at the end of his most recent post above, I also have been keeping month-end hard copies of all my financial accounts for the last 40+ years. So far, it has almost filled up a 4-drawer filing cabinet. I probably should get a fire-proof safe, though, in case of a fire. But it's got to be a really big one! :confused:
 
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