Many expats in Costa Rica, albeit around the word, depend on online banking of Wells Fargo only to be shut out and sent copious messages such as “Your online password has been disabled.”
Wells Fargo and it more recent Florida based Wachovia has yet to announce to its reported 48 million customers and $1.4 trillion in assets that its website has crashed since Monday, December 17, 2012.
Sometimes the Site is Up some times it is down, just try a do normal online banking and see the how long and how frustrating it is to accomplish much of anything.
To have valuable retirement funds directly deposited in U.S. banks and brought in Costa Rica where the government does not insure deposits has been a sound and important strategy. But not today and certainly not this week.
What lacks in all this is that Wells Fargo has yet to give a reason or even admit, except by telephone, that the website has indeed either been infiltrated or crashed.
A bank spokeswoman attributed the difficulties to an “unusually high volume of traffic” on the site, and said customers experiencing difficulties should visit the bank’s branches or ATMs (not so easy if you are in Costa Rica where there are no Wells Fargo branches) to conduct business instead.
The spokesperson declined to provide additional information.
The U.S. banking industry has been hit with a wave of so-called denial of service attacks in recent months, in which perpetrators flood computer networks and render them unusable. Wells Fargo was hit in October, and other major banks including Bank of America Corp., BAC, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Capital One Financial have suffered attacks in recent months as well.
A hacker group that claimed responsibility for the wave of attacks earlier this fall announced last week that it would resume the activity, according to a report in InformationWeek, an industry trade magazine.
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