In the past few years, we’ve witnessed dramatic growth in mobile devices and the services they provide. Whatever you can do on your laptop or desktop you can now do on these pocket-sized gems. Including stealing people’s money.
Joseph Franklin was excited. He had just bought a new smart phone and wanted to use the “apps” to make his life easier. He downloaded a mobile-banking application and entered his bank account number, username, and password. Now he could conduct all his banking transactions with his phone. He thought.
About a week later, he checked his account balance and almost had a heart attack. Someone had withdrawn thousands of dollars from his checking account. He contacted his bank and found that it had never received any information to allow him to open a mobile account. Franklin had downloaded a bogus banking app that allowed fraudsters to pilfer his bank accounts.