I moved to Britain a couple of years ago, and I was surprised at how many legitimate transactions are done in an insecure way.
For example, I had had to talk my credit card number out loud on a telephone call to put a deposit on a flat and to renew some subscriptions.
At the same time, most high street banks have terrible security infrastructure: HSBC regularly calls me and asks me to give sensitive information and sends me PIN codes via snail mail and text message.
These things tend to work in a first-world high-trust society like the UK, but I'm not surprised that people fall for these scams. I'm lucky that most of them seem to target older and more gullible people than I; otherwise they could be impossible to separate from legitimate actions.
The US isn't much better. It's still common to hand your credit card to the waiter in a restaurant where they walk off to some terminal in the back with it and do whatever they want.
For example, I had had to talk my credit card number out loud on a telephone call to put a deposit on a flat and to renew some subscriptions.
At the same time, most high street banks have terrible security infrastructure: HSBC regularly calls me and asks me to give sensitive information and sends me PIN codes via snail mail and text message.
These things tend to work in a first-world high-trust society like the UK, but I'm not surprised that people fall for these scams. I'm lucky that most of them seem to target older and more gullible people than I; otherwise they could be impossible to separate from legitimate actions.