banking

Bank of America seeks to patent abandoning America

Bank of America believes Americans to be overloaded with "a high salary, good benefits, a good work environment, vacation time, and other job-related perks." For shame!

But have no fear, Bank of America has submitted a patent application that will help companies find places to get work done where such pesky things as nice salaries, good benefits, good work environments, and vacation time are abandoned. (And yet, as Bret and Jermaine of Flight of the Conchords suggest, getting cheaper labor doesn't necessarily lead to cheaper products, though it does lead to fatter profits.)

Here's what it looks like:… Read more

Cash in trash: RecycleBank gets hefty funding

RecycleBank on Tuesday said that it has raised $30 million to increase its operations in the U.S. and expand into Europe.

The series B round came from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, RRE Ventures, Sigma Partners, and The Westly Group.

The company has developed a novel business model to incentivize consumers to recycle more.

It gives households points based on the total weight of what they recycle rather than throw away. Those points can be redeemed to purchase more consumer goods, like food and coffee.

So far, RecycleBank has gotten 40 municipalities in the northeastern United States to sign … Read more

Glitch limits access to Citibank accounts

Citibank, the country's largest bank, saw intermittent outages to its Web site Tuesday that prevented an unknown number of customers from accessing their accounts.

"Earlier today we experienced an issue that has resulted in intermittent customer access to Citibank.com," the company said in a statement. "As we are addressing this issue, some users are experiencing slow response times. We hope to be operating normally shortly.

A customer service representative of the bank, a division of financial services powerhouse Citigroup, said the issue began this morning and that the glitch has prevented customers from paying bills … Read more

Eliot Spitzer and the Internet bubble

Five years ago, then N.Y. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer was involved in an investigation into conflicts of interest between research and investment banking at ten of the nation's top investment firms during the Internet bubble.

The landmark $1.4 billion settlement helped put Mr. Spitzer on a fast track to the governor's mansion, but that's not the whole story.… Read more

Swiss bank in Wikileaks case abruptly abandons lawsuit

A Swiss bank that successfully sued to yank the Wikileaks.org domain name, and then faced a severe setback in a subsequent court ruling, has given up for now.

Bank Julius Baer filed a brief note with a court in San Francisco Wednesday saying it would voluntarily dismiss its own case, while reserving the right to file it again in the future or pursue it "in an alternate court, jurisdiction, or venue."

BJB's sudden move comes a few days after U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White reversed his earlier ruling (which pulled the plug on the Wikileaks.… Read more

Identity theft study reveals HSBC, BofA, Wamu top targets

Customers of HSBC, Bank of America, and Washington Mutual suffer the highest rates of identity theft in the banking industry, according to an investigative study released Wednesday by a UC Berkeley Law School researcher.

The Federal Trade Commission received over 245,000 reports of identity theft in 2006, but does not typically publish the names of the financial firms and companies listed in the reports. Through an extensive Freedom of Information Act request, Chris Hoofnagle, a staff attorney at UC Berkeley's Boalt School of Law, was able to get detailed records on the individual consumer complaints.

Hoofnagle received detailed … Read more

Electronic Arts hires Morgan Stanley to do its bidding

Morgan Stanley is the banker representing Electronic Arts in its unsolicited buyout bid for rival game publisher Take-Two, the investment bank confirmed Monday.

While that news alone is no big deal, consider this: Morgan Stanley is also representing Microsoft in its unsolicited buyout offer for Yahoo, which was announced a mere 25 days ago.

That's two megabillion-dollar buyout bids the premier investment banking firm has agreed to handle in the past month. And both have the potential to get mean and nasty, should the target companies kick and scream all the way to the altar.

So, this raises the … Read more

Now Hello Kitty just wants cold, hard cash

Acting in typical expansionist fashion, the Sanrio empire began targeting our finances through a branded credit card a few months back. But apparently its insatiable needs are even more urgent than originally thought, for now it's going directly after our cash.

That's right: There's now a Hello Kitty ATM bank. The miniature teller machine even comes with its own "cash card," as Hello Kitty Hell explains. But don't be fooled: We suspect that it will provide only deposits and no withdrawals.

Phishing e-mails drive FTC chief 'insane'

WASHINGTON--If your in-box is pelted by a seemingly ever-growing supply of inquisitive e-mails purporting to come from the likes of PayPal and Bank of America, the federal agency charged with consumer protection says it feels your pain.

The deceptive technique--in which crooks dispatch e-mails requesting sensitive personal information, typically by masquerading as financial institutions--"is one practice that absolutely drives me insane," Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras told attendees at the first National Cybersecurity Awareness Summit, which was put on here Monday by a nonprofit partnership of federal government agencies and software vendors.

That's because … Read more

False security: Is Bank of America lying to its customers?

A bank that guarantees its online users safety and security has direct evidence that its Web-based banking system may not be 100 percent bullet-proof.

Should that bank tell its customers? And if it doesn't, is it misleading, or even worse, lying, to them?

Bank of America, like many other financial institutions in the U.S., has jumped on the "two-factor" authentication bandwagon. Instead of having its customers log in with just a user name and password, these new schemes require some third bit of information.

Some banks choose to issue their customers a cryptographic hardware token (a … Read more