If your chequing account or credit card gets hacked it's really no big deal, you can easily get your money back because of Regulation E... But certainly this isn't much of a threat as most people have a few thousand or less on their chequing/savings account or creditlimit on their card. Regulation E doesn't cover brokerage accounts though.
But what occurs if your brokerage account(s), which likely hold close to your entire networth get hacked by criminals and money is transferred out? Security for most brokerage accounts isn't particularly amazing, most don't seem to have two factor authentication or other security features beyond a pin for authorizing trades and these days it feel like there's a major breach of a large company once a week.
Do Brokerage companies return your money? - Even if it's hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in losses for a single person?(Certainly if even 100 high-worth individuals get hacked this can simply wipe out a small to mid-sized brokerages profits for a year) Does the customer just have to eat the loss and likely commit suicide? I've been looking at the policies for stock brokerages in Canada(where I live) and it seems like most have uncertain policies, things like promising to "refund money lost as a result of unauthorized actions" but with dubious conditions like "Having up-to-date anti-virus and firewall installed" or "Not sharing your password with others". ( How would they know whether or not you had anti-virus software installed when this occurred? Which is the correct one? How do they know I didn't tell my mom my password, what if I actually did? What if I didn't? What if you use Gnu/Linux and don't run an active antivirus? etc etc). It feels like they could easily make up some reason to tell you to bug off and suffer your huge loss.
Malware has been very advanced for years and I so this seems like a very real threat I am concerned about. Is there something that would prevent them cashing out and transferring your money from your brokerage account? If that is the case couldn't they utilize options contracts or merely pump & dump stocks to benefit themselves anyways?
Please. I would like to get some clearing up on this.
Submitted September 07, 2017 at 08:56PM by rmpFR http://ift.tt/2wO774C
