Help! My Money Info is Breached! (2024)

Breaches of money data in banks could be traumatic. Particularly when the hacker has your financial and personal details with him. Cannot blame you for agonising over someone possessing your money data. Adding to your agony, your bank is not agile enough to freeze your account quickly and give you new debit and credit cards. Getting a swift provisional credit for your loss is out of the question. Inevitably, you end up reeling under a host of horrifying negative feelings.

The Exit-Not to Exit Dilemma

Quite natural that your first reaction borders on the extreme. You want to close the account and exit the data-breached bank. Exiting the bank does not solve your problem as the transgressor still has your data. This is why your Hamletian dilemma ‘to exit the bank or not to exit the bank’ is justified. Sounds sensible when you ask yourself why should you continue with a careless bank.

You are sure cut up with your bank for sure. You are angry that your bank failed to take all standard operating steps to protect your personal money data. That is gross deficiency in service. You are entitled to your right to drag the bank to the courts for failing to insulate your personal money information from leaks and breaches. Viewed from any angle, the bank deserves to be penalised.

A Petty-Piddly Compensation

Your anger is understandable. Agreed, you want to snap ties with your bank. If you are determined, do it within a couple of months of the breach. At most within six months. The idea is to avoid bearing and sharing the cost of returning to health. The bank may try to retain you. It may compensate you for the data theft by paying you some money. That will not be enough and sure it would be a petty-piddly consolation.

Quit the bank, if you should. Do not be a party to the bank’s frantic efforts to trace the crime to its perpetrator. Do not be an unwilling receptacle to the bank’s excuses designed for consoling cribbing customers. Almost always, after a data breach, banks suffer loss of customer confidence. This loss is unmeasurable, but certainly great. And the loss is certain to hamper the bank’s process of new customer additions.

Video Courtesy: YouTube/Queen City News

Quit the Bank and You Should

As new customers dwindle, the bank’s growth would get stunted. This in turn would force the bank to reduce its bouquet of services. It is time you quit the bank, particularly after a mega data breach. More so if the data theft and breach become a national talking point and hog the headlines for long. Do not let your money turn into a subject of salacious gossips.

However, headline-hogging and gossip-mongering data breaches ultimately force a huge emotional cost on bank customers. Avoid bearing this cost. Quit the bank and you should. The bank may tilt more towards online and mobile banking. It may launch its easy-to-use apps for banking business. But they need time to build. They have a cost. You may not like to start all over again. Yes, do not.

Easy Opacity vs Expensive Transparency

Remember, the need to make the bank’s online and mobile offerings more secure is ever greater after the data breach. It is an onerous task. As a down-to-earth bank customer, you may not like to be a part of that arduous journey of the bank. So, move over to a bank that is more secure and enjoys a head start in high data safety and security. It is a clear option, make up your mind and just move on.

You may still argue that more secure banks are also the most expensive banks with high service charges. Worse, stringent banking regulations stipulating data-safety standards force banks to have a large establishment. This pushes up the cost of their services further. However, understand transparency comes at a cost. Opacity may be easy to practice and economical, but transparency is expensive and yet efficient.

The MoneyMire’s Last Word

Over the long haul, secure banks tend to be cost-effective for customers. As frauds are eliminated and breaches are avoided, overall cost of operations dip. Customers end up being a part of a successful money story. Money is not just a matter of central fiat. It should give you security and happiness. No doubt, move your money away from a breached bank to such a happy situation.

• theobjectivist07011961

• Blog
• March 11, 2024
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