It's easy to see a story like mine and conclude that its circumstances are special and this will never happen to you. But the point to consider is that EVERYONE'S circumstances are special in their own way, and whatever it is they did to me, they sure MIGHT do it to you... If they happen to feel like it. Once they've demonstrated that they can't be trusted in one instance, there's no reason to believe they can EVER be trusted.
Here's what happened to me:
We have a small, family-owned business. It's what's called a "market-maker", and the business we do is in conjunction with an on-line company called e-gold.com. We're an independent company listed on the e-gold.com website as one of their certified market-makers. Our own site is at http://getgold. Ws, should you be interested.
A market-maker buys and sells gold. People send dollars, I transfer gold into their account. People transfer gold into our account, I send them dollars. On each transaction I make a little, and that's what makes it a business. Obviously, with this kind of business you have to move a lot of money, and you have to have a lot of cash available in order to stay in business.
I was using NetBank principally because of a feature they have where account holders can send money between one NetBank account and another. One of the biggest challenges of my business is to ensure that incoming funds are irreversible. That's because gold, once it's been transferred on the e-gold system, is irreversible. On several inquiries, NetBank customer service had assured me that once one of these intra-bank transfers is done, it's irreversible. "Perfect", I thought, "Just what I need."
Things were going well, and since NetBank is quite a popular on-line bank, a lot of people had accounts there and made use of the intra-bank transfer feature. Then, on 26 April disaster!
I logged in to my account, but I couldn't do anything. My account, I learned, was "frozen". Why was it frozen? No one would say. When would it be unfrozen? No one would say. I reread the Terms of Service, looking to see what I must have missed. I had never noticed where they had the authority to seize my money at will for as long as they wanted. When I looked again I still didn't find it. It wasn't there.
Their Terms of Service, it turns out, defines the limits of what YOU can do to them, but, as a matter of their practice, it doesn't define the limits of what THEY can do to you! They can and will, it turns out, do anything they damn well please with your money... Once they get their hands on it.
But wait, that's not all. A few days later I noticed that my account balance had slipped down a thousand or two. A notation indicated that the same amount I had received from a customer on 24 April (and had transfered gold as a result) had been returned to that customer without my permission. Why? By now they weren't taking or answering my calls, so the answer remains unknown to this day.
I have a theory. I think someone hacked their system and transfered money from someone's account to mine, then I think this hacker came to my website, filled out our forms, and requested an e-gold purchase with the transfered funds. I think the real account owner then reported the loss (and the underlying hack) to NetBank, and I think perhaps the whole frozen-account and returned-funds thing is the result.
OK, it's just a theory. I have no way of proving it, but it seems the most plausible explanation to all the events. If it were wrong, NetBank could, of course, remedy it simply by communicating with me and giving me the true story. Since they haven't and until they do, I'm considering it true. So let's see what the implications are of this.
For the moment, let's ignore the issue of them stealing money from my account without my permission. Damning enough is the knowledge that NetBank is being hacked and that NetBank is trying to cover it up. As you might imagine, NetBank, being an on-line-only bank, Internet security has got to be their #1 concern. It takes the place of the big, heavy vault doors you see in brick-and-mortar banks. If the word gets out that it's easy for thugs to get through those doors, people will have no confidence, they'll withdraw their money, and that will be end of that.
Well, that's the deal, folks. The bank IS insecure. Your money is insecure. Take it out. Don't put it in in the first place. Sure, they made good for whoever the account holder was by taking my money and giving it back to him. But notice what they DIDN'T do:
They DIDN'T contact me and ask for my help. I could have given them valuable information about the person who ordered the gold. They probably could have taken this information to law enforcement to track down the criminal. They didn't do it, why?
Probably because to have done so they would have been admitting to me that they had, indeed, been hacked. They were so intent on not letting this out that they preferred the alternative: incurring my certain wrath by seizing and stealing my funds. They hoped that I wouldn't have the moxie to get the word out, and they calculated that their secret would be better kept this way.
Maybe, maybe. But I'm doing everything I can to prove them wrong. Spread the word.
Paul
Anchorage, Alaska
USA
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