Regions Bank Fraud

I received an email today telling me to update my Regions Bank account info. That's just suspicious under any conditions. I KNEW this was fraud because I don't have an account with Regions Bank. The url pointed to some similarly named site that was not the regular regions.com.

So then began the insanity. Within 15 minutes of the email getting to my gmail account, I was on the phone to warn them of the scheme. One problem: there's no way to reach a human. They even had a REPORT FRAUD number that I dialed but it just went to regular customer service. The only fraud it mentioned was lost/stolen cards or strange charges.

I called a couple more numbers and finally called the online tech support. I thought I was getting somewhere, but the number just rang for five minutes until I finally hung up.

So now many more of their customers will pay for the fact that they do everything they can to NOT answer the phone.

I sent in a message via their online form. There was no fraud option there, so I had to put it under "other". It'll probably get lost in other stuff until late tomorrow. I put "FRAUD ALERT!" at the top to get their attention, but they'll probably think I'm spamming them.

Hmmm, maybe there's something to having solid, open communication with your customers and the public.

Transparency Tyranny

Interesting article on Transparency Tyranny. It's tyranny for the producers, but a triumph for consumers. Producers won't like it because it limits their ability to arbitrage information. However, as with everything, this is a huge opportunity for new businesses and some existing one's as well.

The website has an RSS feed of new companies. I had it in my google reader for a couple days, but had to cut it off. I just couldn't read about 50 new companies a day. Sheesh.