When christina guilbert got a call from her bank in march about an attempt to steal money from her account, she was alarmed-and suspicious. How could someone access her account from an automated teller machine in England when her ATM card was in her home in Boston? Was the caller really a bank representative or a thief fabricating a story in an attempt to get account information from her? "With all of the scams on the Internet, I Knew they could try the same thing using the phone," Guilbert says. Guilbert had the bank rep confirm his identity by providing infromation on a recent transaction on her account. The bank blocked the attempted withdrawal, but Guilbert, who works at a public-relation s firm, still doesn't know how the overseas thief got her account information. Guilbert's faith in doing any kind of business online has been destroyed. "I was concerned about shopping online before; now I won't shop online at all," she says. The shift to internet-based customer transactions and electronic storage of customer data provides huge improvements in speed and convenience for consumers and efficiency for retailers and service providers. But it's also creating new opportunities for criminals. With so many ways for personal data to leak out, from a hacker attack to a stolen company laptop, and identity thieves increasingly effective at quickly exploiting any breach, companies are struggling to hang on to their most precious asset: customer trust.
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