On 11/29/2014 1:05 AM, Lodewijk wrote:
Hi Garfield,
Thanks for the clarification. It's surprising to me that posting a bank account number could lead to fraud - the bank systems are supposed to be robust enough for that. I know that all charities in the Netherlands post this number on their website - maybe it could be worth while to reach out and see if switching banks might improve the security, if Citibank didn't fix it themselves? (There is little relevancy of security to 'IBAN' itself of course, which is merely a bank account number. I'm assuming you're referring to what people can do using that number to get access in the bank).
One avenue for fraud that's facilitated by posting account numbers is small payment fraud, usually involving stolen credit cards. The basic technique is that when people illegally buy credit card numbers in large volumes, since they normally don't possess an actual card, they commonly test the validity of the card information by making very small online payments or donations to a known account. If the transaction goes through, they know the card number can be "safely" used for larger-scale fraud. Meanwhile, the small donations will invariably be backed out of the system, whether by the fraudsters themselves or by the financial institutions cleaning up later when the fraud is detected.
I don't know if that's the specific reason for the decision here, but I know the fundraising team has dealt with fraud of this type in the past, and there may be other issues as well. Ultimately it may not directly threaten the security of our donors or the funds they contribute, but it does create costs to the organization when it has to identify and review a significant amount of fraudulent activity. Also, in financial circles becoming a target for fraud or money laundering, even inadvertently, could affect our reputation and the willingness of other organizations to work with us.
As for our own difficulties around communications here, I suspect on all sides we don't fully appreciate the challenges involved when trying to merge financial cultures in a global sense. A system may provide relatively open access to credit while treating bank information as highly sensitive (as the US mostly does), or it may be more open with bank information while being much more restrictive about credit (as some European countries do). Each system has its security practices tailored to facilitating typical transaction flows within the system. The underlying assumptions may not work well across systems and may hinder the ability to establish smooth connections between the two sides. I certainly don't claim that the American system is necessarily superior, but in the past when we've considered in which jurisdiction the Wikimedia Foundation should base its operations, I think the financial regime has been a secondary consideration, relative to other priorities.
--Michael Snow