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Question: How do hackers manage to steal money from people's accounts?
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I know that you can simply use packet sniffers and whatnot to read and decrypt peoples emails and passwords, and then use those to log into their email, and get account names, numbers, etc.

But my question is, how do hackers get the money out of the accounts without being tracked down?

Example: I log onto public WIFI, log into gmail with my username/email address and password. As a normal, ignorant computer user, my password for my bank account, PayPal and email are all the same (don't worry, in real life they aren't :P). A hacker is reading all the traffic on the network and capturing usernames and passwords. The hacker logs into my gmail, finds my saved PayPal information, and proceeds to log into my PayPal. How does he get the funds out?

If he just transfers all the funds from my PayPal to his, then he can easily be tracked down. Even if his PayPal is bogus, to get the money from PayPal he has to have a valid bank account. Supposing he set up a bogus bank account, he'd still be caught on security camera opening the account at a given date and time.

So, how do hackers get the money out of the accounts? I know that with things like Zeus, they can transfer money and then re-add fake money to the account, and then remove evidence of the transaction, but this requires more access than most hackers will have.

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13 years ago