Using SG at financial firms

General discussion re sg.

Using SG at financial firms

Postby vikasa » Fri Oct 17, 2014 5:33 pm

I am a long-time SG user, use it extensively at all sorts of places. But when I use it at financial firms, I found myself thinking....so I am willing to trust this company with my (potentially lots of) money but not with my real email address? Something doesn't feel right here. Surely my email address is not more valuable than my money, is it?

How have folks squared with this kind of thinking?
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Re: Using SG at financial firms

Postby josh » Tue Oct 21, 2014 12:45 am

That's good thinking - you do place a large amount of trust in your financial institution (i.e., bank). (And, after reading all the disclaimers upon disclaimers that we put in every conceivable location for spamgourmet, you should not consider spamgourmet to be up to any finance-industry standard... I'm just sayin'...)

I use it for my bank - but of course I would, I'm running the service. I had two addresses with them - one for the bank itself, and one for a brokerage service - originally, the two were distinct enough that you had to sign up separately -- that changed later. I have never received even one piece of spam on the banking address.

Anyway, within the last year, the brokerage address has started getting spam on it (!) - I have no idea what happened. The fact that the banking address is still clean makes me think they were not in the same database.

I tried to let the bank/brokerage know, but it was a frustrating conversation - the support staff just weren't set up to comprehend what I was trying to tell them ("forward us the email you got" ... "well, I could, but that's not really the point - the point is that I should not have gotten any email on this address at all" .. "you need to forward it to us" ... etc.)

All that said, if you can't trust your bank, it's time to move your money.

It's Wells Fargo Advisors that had the compromised address, btw.
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Re: Using SG at financial firms

Postby vikasa » Tue Oct 21, 2014 12:55 pm

Josh - Thanks for your reply. Yes, I am on the same page. I have never received any spam from any financial institution. Of course, if you follow the news, banks and retail forms get hacked every other day, but that's another story :-)

I do trust my bank but I guess I am the "trust but verify" sort of person. I would like to know if they are worthy of my trust on an ongoing basis and using SG is the best way to do this because if I do get any spam on the address I know they have (willingly or unwillingly) sold my email address.

Thanks
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Re: Using SG at financial firms

Postby Nuke » Fri Dec 19, 2014 5:38 pm

vikasa wrote:....so I am willing to trust this company with my (potentially lots of) money but not with my real email address? .. Surely my email address is not more valuable than my money, is it?

Your money certainly is more valuable than your email addr, but that does not mean that the latter is worthless. I do trust the bank with my money, but not with my email addr, because the bank (and everyone else in the world) recognise that stealing/losing your money would be a very serious crime or at least a major fail (and headline news), for which you would almost cetainly be re-imbursed (unless the bank actually go bankrupt at that moment), but OTOH many people (including maybe the bank's marketing dept) would regard the misuse or sale of your email addr as "just one of those things", to be shrugged off, and there would certainly be no sort of re-imbursement for it (how could there be? the djinne is out of the bottle).

In fact the marketing dept would not even regard spamming you as misuse of your address - these people really believe they are "enriching" your life and doing you a favour.

The bank is therefore more likely to misuse your email address than your money, because they are more likely to get away with doing so.
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Re: Using SG at financial firms

Postby Jim27106 » Mon Jan 26, 2015 8:31 pm

exactly. Banks have lots of checks on money. Although I have a TDAmeritrade I think they lost those email addresses (see the forums) before my account was purchased. I do get spam on a credit union account. However, the rates compensate for their database leakage. And I can just change the email address I gave them.
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Re: Using SG at financial firms

Postby vellire » Tue Jan 27, 2015 6:25 pm

I like to use SG for financial firms because it makes it very clear that any communications from my bank which do not come to the specified account and from the trusted sender are phishing attempts. Usually these things are easy to spot, but it's absolutely trivial if I see a supposed bank statement link that has been sent to an account I use for online purchases. Delete!
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