Credit cards blocked when travelling (and fraud generally)

Vodafone offer a free VOIP solution called Wifi Calling.

Both of us had it enabled but it never worked. So I spent some time on the phone to them and hey ho they “reconfigured their computer” and now it works. It turns on where you perform some outgoing action and there is zero GSM signal. More importantly it also turns on by itself when there is zero GSM signal but not all the time; not sure how they get that to work. Obviously there is no such thing as a “push notification” on 4G (with GSM there is, which is how incoming calls work) so the phone must go online every x seconds.

So I seem to have solved this in two ways… the other one being the illegal chinese 900MHz amplifier (it does 1800MHz also but does not pick up any signal on 1800MHz).

Those Swedish products must be keeping a low profile but perhaps they would not ship to the UK anyway.

Your URL, Lionel, is probably what here they call a “femtocell”. Voda used to do a thing called Sure Signal which apparently worked but required the opening of a load of ports in one’s router for inbound traffic which is the most dumb thing to do (the chinks will be in there in seconds, trying to hack it) so when I discovered that, I sent it right back. Years ago.

Most of this is no good if you are away from home and with no GSM signal, but the Vodafone Wifi Calling thingy doesn’t require registration so should work in an internet cafe in Botswana.

This is how the UK LAA got taken for £64k

A very similar thing happened to a neighbour here, but she was aged 80. That was probably about 30k.

The LAA fraud smells of a “business” where nobody has their “finger on the pulse”. The guy says it happened “on his watch” but the very obvious thing is that he wasn’t watching anything.

It was probably an office manageress (he uses “they” so obviously a woman) who was doing her best to keep the outfit hanging together in the face of mayhem all around, interspersed with lunches of the old boy network. Well the “mayhem” is obvious if you speak to anyone involved with the LAA…

And while I know nothing of her age, people of certain generations have a weakness when it comes to fraud: they try hard to do the right thing; that is exactly how that 80 year old got ripped off using the most unbelievably blatent fraud which went on for 3 days, with the conmen phoning her all day for 3 days while she was driving around bank to bank to bank collecting € cash. The bank, Lloyds, reimbursed her because they would not have wanted the newspapers to run an article about how absolutely stupid a whole series of Lloyds Bank cashiers must have been (they see your account statement on the terminal when you draw money). The LAA would have got no such benefit because it is a company and they are fair game for fraud.

My banks are all encouraging me to use face recognition for security. Along with fingerprint for phone opening it’s an opportunity.
Knock someone unconscious, hold camera to thumb, hold camera to face, and there bank contents arej available.

It is really really dumb to use one’s phone for banking, because of that and other reasons (like the reception of an SMS message ).

Yes the banks here seem stupid beyond belief, but it’s hard to believe it is unique.

Much more likely:

• you know a lot about the system
• you live in a small country which, ex-communism, had an opportunity to start fresh, and back in communist days had a good science education system
• almost nobody posts anything critical of their own country on EuroGA
• ex the US, the UK is by far the richest English speaking country, and with English being by far the most widely understood language in the countries with the most scammers (China/Russia for the remote stuff, Albania/Romania/Bulgaria/Serbia for the personal-contact stuff) the UK will get far more attacks than say Croatia, Greece, France, etc, whose language practically nobody in these countries speaks

The big scams work on

• cleverly exploting aspects of human psychology
• picking up some documents from a rubbish bin
• maybe inside job in a bank (nobody will tell me 50,000 employees will be honest; 27% has a criminal record and 3% have been in prison)

Maybe UK banks are more scared of fraud than continental banks. The UK has an atmosphere of “everybody is a victim, and everybody has to be kind to victims” so everybody is scared of creating “victims”. This whole victim thing is promoted heavily, all day long, by the media. Just read bbc.co.uk. Nobody is stupid, everybody is just a victim. So they tie themselves with their own rope.

I doubt the actual IT system security of banks here is more crap than anybody else’s. It’s a business full of stupid new paradigms, one every month, causing almost everybody over 40 to hate their job. Few get the chance to use their experience to create solid systems. I know a guy who works at Deutsche Bank, Germany, in IT, and he hates it like all the others. Few experienced people stay…