Summary: A California woman is suing Google for failing to reimburse her for transactions they admit were created by hackers.
It’s the nightmare of the internet age: that all this online transferring of funds and identities and information could expose our assets to hackers. Susan Harvey of Madera California experienced such a hijacking when downloading a simple app from the Google Play store account.
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A year later, she suffered the shock of discovering that over 600 transactions had been made on her account costing her thousands. Not only that, but Google didn’t believe her about it. They didn’t believe her until they had to, after she filed a police report and searched down vendors, exposing the transaction numbers to be fake and associated with Google.
At this point, Google made no gesture to refinance her for the hacked account. Finally, with enough time spent finding out how this happened, and seeking out how she was hacked, Google agreed to reimburse her.
Only they didn’t. That’s why Harvey has filed a lawsuit. The suit, filed in US District Court in East California, points out that “Google finally acknowledged that she clearly did not effectuate the transactions,” though they never reimbursed her.
The suit further says that Google did not sufficiently secure her “e-mail address, password, debit card number, expiration date, and mailing and billing addresses, in accordance with industry security standards,” which ultimately “allowed hackers to obtain her information and subsequently post fraudulent transactions” to her bank account.
News Source: Arstechnica
