Identity Theft

[arby]

Just wondering if anyone else has had any issues with identity theft after using the freephoneline.ca service. Recently I have had my complete identity stolen and the individuals have managed to access my bank account using telephone banking. Some of the information they used for the telephone banking could have only come from times that I have contacted the bank by phone myself. They have not been able to use my internet banking, only telephone banking.

Let be clear that I'm not saying that it is the freephoneline.ca group, however it may be criminals that has figured out a way to listen / intercept to my calls. This is merely a guess and thought I would put it out there to see if anyone else has had similar problems after using this service.

[Funkytown]

2 questions I may ask
You using a cordless phone?
You using wireless?

[FONGO_kris]

SIP Packet interception is hard in itself, let alone retrieving any assemblance of audible conversation from it. I will suggest that maybe it was some other method of communication, which bank are you with?

Most banks require that you give them your last x number of transactions to access telephone banking, or something else you'd only find on your online account, or by physical usage.

[FONGO_steve]

Admin is correct in saying that VOIP conversations are actually far more secure than landline ones. With a landline, anyone can stand outside your residence and piggy back a set onto your line and listen in. With VOIP, intercepting and re-assembling the VOIP packets between all your other data packets from other software, downloads, etc. is next to impossible unless someone were specifically targeting you and had a lot of time, and access to some very intelligent people.

Cordless phones, like Funkytown mentioned, are subject to being intercepted by anyone with a quality scanner radio that operates in that frequency.

Wireless, especially insecure wireless, also opens up a new field where potential criminals could access your home computers, files, internet history, etc. For ultimate security, it's best to turn off SSID broadcast in your wireless router and change it to a name only you can remember.

[kenporter]

With wireless internet even if you have SSID turned off it is easily found out with some basic software. And as for secure wireless internet it takes about 5 min or less to "hack" your key. Anyone can do it with just a lap top and some very easy to use software found on line. If you do use wireless internet make sure its WPA2 with AES is enabled. The best bet is try to avoid wireless all together. Even if your computer is wired and you have wireless internet turned on and someone wants to hack into the wireless they can still access your "wired" computer. Myself I refuse to use a router with wireless. Its much too easy to hack into and gain any information they want from you. It much easier than you might think.


As for the information that was taken from this guy, even if someone hacked your internet they would have one hell of a time gathering all the information from your phone call and getting the info they need, YES they could do this, however it is much easier to get the information from your computer and use that informaion.

All in all I would say not to use wireless internet no matter what. the easiest place to collect wireless information is places like the mall, motels, coffee shops that offer free internet.

Just a little info i wanted to pass off to the FPL people.

[arby]

Thank you for the feedback everyone, I do use both wireless devices at home. I may want to consider going back to the wired world.

[curriegrad2004]

If you do use wireless internet make sure its WPA2 with AES is enabled.

True, WPA2-PSK with AES enabled is the first step on securing the wireless access point. The other key point is selecting a password that is long and hard to guess, although there are people taking the mad scientist approach on 'cracking' WPA2. Don't ask what this mad scientist approach is, but it is out there.

However, if you are skilled enough to raise the game, you can certainly go through all the time and effort to set up a WPA2-Enterprise WiFi access point. To the best of my knowledge, WPA2-Enterprise hasn't been successfully cracked due to a vulnerability within the authentication scheme itself and to date it is considered as the most secure form of WiFi encryption.