Account hacking: how to protect yourself from scammers
Despite the fact that in the life of modern man play one of the key roles, few people think seriously about the security of their finances. Sadly, this is also true for most Forex traders. One can understand a beginning trader - the sum on deposit However, with time the trader gains experience, the income stabilizes and grows, the amount on the deposit increases. And the more disappointing it is to lose money on one's account due to disregard of elementary safety rules. What are the ways for fraudsters to gain access to a currency trader's money?
Do you like Internet surfing? You may not have the password to your account at
The easiest way that scammers practice is to steal logins and passwords from traders' accounts. Special programs are used for this purpose. Such programs, or rather "Trojan" viruses, are very easy to get infected on the Internet. As a rule, they look like an invitation to install some additional software, advertising banners with pretty content, or may be completely unnoticeable. Unfortunately, these programs are designed in such a way that not every anti-virus program is able to detect them. This is mostly true for free antiviruses.
In this regard, it makes sense to check your computer for the presence of such malware through special anti-virus utilities before registering on the broker or dealing center website.
Don't keep important data from your trading account in the mail!
Another common way to obtain data on trader is email. Here the attackers have several options.
The first and easiest of these is hacking into a mailbox. Often traders keep emails from brokersThe emails received during registration, which contain the data for accessing the account. It is not a difficult task for an experienced programmer to gain access to such emails, especially those stored on some publicly available email services.
The second way of obtaining data implies elementary carelessness. An e-mail is sent to the trader's mail with a request to change the access password, indicating the old one, to participate in the testing of some new system, using the existing data for identification. There can also be a notification about winning a prize in some made-up contest, for example, "You have become a 100500 visitor" or "The computer has selected your candidacy among 100500 traders to participate in...". Such letters usually come from email addresses that visually resemble the broker's mailing address. It is strongly not recommended to open such e-mails and follow the links.
The third way is a combination of the first and second. The trader receives an email with some attention-grabbing name. Having opened such an email, the trader runs a special program that collects all the logins and passwords found and sends them to their owner.
Not just a "password" from a Forex account, but a "personal password"
In order to minimize the risk of having your email hacked, you should have a separate mailbox that will be used exclusively for receiving emails from the broker and will not be used when registering with other resources.
Sometimes malefactors, under various pretexts: profitable investment and other tricks, try to steal the password from the user. There is no need to be naive - no one is going to share money just like that. Of course, this only works with the most gullible and shallow traders, but still, the key word here is "works". On some sites they write not just "Password" but "Personal Password", not just "Trader's Cabinet", but "Trader's Cabinet" and this is the most competent approach. You must always remember that the password to your account is your own, it's absolutely unacceptable to give it to someone else.
How can you tell if your account has been compromised before the money is lost? The most obvious sign that intruders have gained access to your account and are trying to make some operations with it is a disconnection or freezing during the operation of the trading terminal. If this happens, you should change your passwords immediately and immediately inform the support service of your broker.