Retirement Account Hackers : Oh No!

Talk about everyone’s worst nightmare. Can you imagine, saving for your retirement for 25 or even 35-40 years, having a huge balance in your retirement account, and not even believing that you actually accomplished saving this much money, the most money you’ve ever had at your disposal.

Then, imagine, one morning, you wake up, you check your retirement account balance, and it’s all gone, not a penny of it is left. And you know that you did not withdraw that money. Well, apparently 401k and retirement fund theft is now the latest scam for thief hackers to prey on hard working people now.

Think about it, retirement funds are the best way for a hacker to get large sums of money at once, and the security measures in place currently for someone to drain an account without red flags being raised, frankly needs work to me, for accounts with such high balances and so much for hard workers to lose (their life savings, try). I just read a story about a man who saved for 25 years, and had close to $200 thousand dollars saved for his and his wife’s retirement, which they planned to start enjoying in the next few years.

He checked his account one day and the whole account had been drained by some savvy hacker who covered their tracks by changing his deposit account, extracting all the money, then changing the payment account back to his account number. His story had a happy ending, because the investigation actually yielded them the crook and they were able to recover the funds (the generous company even offered to honor any market gains he would have recieved had the money never been stolen.

But not all these stories will have such a happy ending. The problem is, right now there are not really any backup plans or insurance plans in place for retirement accounts, protecting people from ruthless scum who would just invade and deplete an account overnight.

In other words, if someone hacks your credit card information, you can deny the charges, and you are actually insured against credit card fraud, whereas with this type of identity theft, the companies are not required to reimburse you for anything. Like I said, it’s a good thing that this guy had a happy ending, but this could indeed have turned very ugly.