Day 45 (136 days to go…)

Had some annoying bank issues today. Usually I log into my bank while connected through the company VPN so it looks like my IP is U.S. based. Well a few days ago I tried to log in and I wasn’t connected to the VPN. Since my IP was weird (coming from Afghanistan) I guess the site thought I may be an intruder. In any case it prompted me with my security questions. I HATE those questions. You never know how a site is going to use them, and half the information you can find out by doing some searches around the web about the person. You hear about celebrities’ accounts getting broken into via this method all the time.

Anyways, because of this I usually will fill in the questions with garbage as I don’t forget my passwords, and I take proper security precautions (like using very strong random char strings for my passwords). Well when the site decides to do what my bank was now doing… you kinda get screwed. I couldn’t answer the questions so it locked my account. I called in (via my flaky internet connection) to get my account unlocked. After being bounced around I finally ended up at the security department. The woman I was talking to said that everything looked fine on my account and she didn’t even see the trouble ticket. I tried to log in to my account again, this time through the VPN, and voila, it worked. I hung up and thought that was it.

Fast forward to today. I get an email saying my entire bank account had been locked for suspicious activity. I again call in to see what the heck is going on now. It turns out that for whatever reason when I talked to the security department, my help ticket hadn’t made it over yet. When it did make it over they tried to call me on my cell number. Now I am in Afghanistan; of course my cell phone number doesn’t work. When that didn’t work they waited a couple days and tried again. Since they couldn’t get a hold of me they decided to lock EVERYTHING. So after finding out what HAPPENED, I asked how I can get it all unlocked. The woman wants me to come into a branch office. I explain that this is impossible. After going round and round a bit she finally comes up with a solution where she goes through some system that asks all this personally identifying information. She warns that you can only do this once though and if we screw up, there would be no second chance. Luckily I got everything right, and she was able to reset my account, including my security questions. How troublesome…

So I have learned 3 things:

1) Be careful when dealing with security questions for important things like banks

2) Use VPN out here

3) Notify your bank you are traveling oversees… might make things a LOT easier >_<



~David