Normally I’d just delete it, but this one was slightly different for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, instead of pointing me to a website to phish the details, this one included a webpage as an attachment, rather than a link. Even without the other obvious signs, that would ring alarm bells. Here’s what the attachment looked like:

Fill in the details, and your details will probably be used by the spammer to login to your account on the HSBC website.

Secondly, the email tries just too hard to get me to use the form they’ve attached. Here’s the text of the email:

—–

Dear HSBC Online User,

We regret to inform you that access to your online account has been locked.

This happened because of too many failed log-in attempts.

To restore your online account access you can:

1. Visit your local branch and complete the Unlock My Account form (takes several days)

2. Complete the Unlock My Account form online, by downloading and completing the attached form (instant)

Quality service and the security of your account are of great importance to us.

We appreciate each opportunity to serve you.

Sincerely,

Customer Service

—–

It’s that point #2 that really looks desperate, offering instant re-activation of my account, rather than a few days wait should I go into a branch.

Anyway, regardless of the method, the ultimate result was the same – a spam report was sent and the email was deleted.

Always be suspicious of emails from your bank asking you to login, especially if there are links in the email, or even attachments. You should always type the web address in yourself before logging in, to be more sure you’re navigating to the correct website.

HSBC “Online Access Disabled” Spam was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

Wired recently published an article entitled “The Future of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free” which is worth a read, if you have a spare 20 minutes.

Whilst the article briefly discusses a few innovative payment systems, such as Square and TwitPay, it largely focuses on PayPal, going into some of its history, how it innovated by opening up to developers, but actually begins to look like an advertorial for the payment company.

But the article’s real value is in the comments, which largely dispell the authors ideas that PayPal is a cheap way of processing payment compared with credit card companies and banks.

Wow! – this article got me all excited about how to get back at the greedy financial institutions. Move Your Money is a great idea, but shortcutting the bankers multiple fees sounded even better, until I checked out Twitpay’s website – Powered by Paypal, “The recipient of the payment will be required to pay PayPal’s commercial transaction fee of 2.9% + 0.30 USD and any other applicable fees.” Whoa, is this a race to see who can charge the HIGHEST fees?

It’s true that PayPal has pushed the boundaries of payment by opening up its infrastructure – or perhaps it’s the developers using their infrastructure that are really the innovative ones – but they still seem to charge a high price for this freedom.

As we mentioned yesterday, fees threaten to hold (mobile) payment processors back.

The Future Of Money was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

Meghan Keane at eConsultancy has some thoughts on PayPal’s new iPhone app which features Bump technology to allow users to transfer money quickly between iPhones.

Her view is that a well established payment provider such as PayPal is more likely to be widely accepted rather than a brand new service such as Square (a bit of hardware that attaches to your iPhone to accept card payments), but that the fees PayPal charges could hold it back.

Both Square and PayPal take a cut of of the money that gets paid through their services. PayPal takes a percentage of every transaction. It’s free to send money with a bank account, but credit card payments are subject to a fee executed by PayPal. Meanwhile, if users want to access the money they’ve been paid through the service, PayPal also takes a cut — usually 2.9%… as long as people have to pay a fee to access money they’ve been paid with a mobile phone, rumors of this sort of thing replacing cash will be highly exaggerated.

We’ve seen from the experience of charging ATMs that people do indeed hate to get their hands on their own money, regardless of whether they appreciate that some of these services do not come for free.

Fees Will Hold Back Mobile Payments was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

PayPal have just released a new version of their popular iPhone application which allows two iPhone users to quickly transfer money using an iPhone “bump”.

The app has been completely redesigned to give it a slick new look and feel, and once logged in, as well as bump transfers, there are a variety of other tools to allow you to collect money from a group of friends and split bills easily.

Once you’ve logged in to the app, you can check your PayPal balance, view recent transactions and withdraw money to your bank account.

Screenshots

The login screen is pretty self explanatory. This follows an animation which loads when you launch the app. Nice to look at on the first load, but after that it gets a little tiresome. Luckily you can get straight to the login screen by tapping the screen whilst the animation is bouncing around your screen. Instead of using your normal PayPal email address and password, you can also setup a PIN to go with your phone number and login using those instead.

As well as “bumping” two iPhones together to quickly transfer money between users (see below), there are also tools to help you split a bill, including adding a tip. Below shows a £75 bill with 15% tip added, split between 4 persons.

Once you’ve done the calculation, you can then request money from those sharing the bill, selecting from your list of contacts in you iPhone, again assuming that the email address you have for them is a valid PayPal email address. If not, it will ask them to setup a new PayPal account.

There’s also a function to setup reminders to help you remember regular payments such as monthly bills, perhaps your mortgage or council tax.

As well as your PayPal balance, you can also see the last few transactions on your account, and request to withdraw money to your bank account, which is another new addition to the app.

If you’ve got another iPhone user nearby and need to transfer money to them, you can use the new “bump” feature to send them money – just enable the feature on each iPhone (so you’ll both need the app installed, and switched on), and bump your phones together. I assume the other iPhone user will need a valid PayPal account before this will work.

Verdict

Overall, it’s a good app, and pretty much a must-have for regular PayPal users. The app has become more useful now that you can see your recent transactions and withdraw money to your bank account, and the bump features and bill-splitting tools are a nice to have, but how useful they are will ultimately be dependent on how many of your friends have a current PayPal account, and are happy to move money around in this way.

As well as the iPhone app, PayPal also has an app for both the Android and Blackberry platforms (search for PayPal in the Android Market/Blackberry App World).

PayPal iPhone App: “Bump” Phones To Transfer Money was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

The banking issue that refuses to die sees yet another D-Day tomorrow (16th March), as the Office of Fair Trading will announce the future of bank charges.

According to MoneySavingExpert, the announcement follows talks with themselves, current account providers and consumer groups.

The consumer watchdog is “expected to announce a voluntary code agreed with banks and building societies to improve the structure of charges for exceeding your overdraft limit, that are levied in future. It is not likely to address reclaiming charges you have already received.”

After all of the controversy and the rhetoric from the OFT and MoneySavingExpert over the last couple of years, it’s a little sad to see the results reduced to a voluntary code. But if it does eventually mean more transparent charges and makes it easier to compare bank and building society accounts, then at least some good will have come of it all.

It will be little consolation for those who had hundreds or even thousands of pounds worth of overdraft charges applied to their accounts, and no longer stand to get the charges repaid.

photo credit: shrff

Bank Charges: Yet Another D-Day Tomorrow was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

An article by “Undercover Economist” Tim Harford discusses the economics behind the auction site Swoopo.co.uk.

If you’ve not heard of the site, it has an interesting twist on the normal eBay style bidding; if you want to make a bid on Swoopo, you have to pay:

Swoopo runs “pay-to-bid” auctions, where each bid costs you money. As a result, everyone who participates in the auction ends up paying something, and while the winner may get a bargain, all the losing bidders are out of pocket.

It’s definitely an interesting way of selling items, but some have called it “devilish” as it can often generate far more for the seller than in other auctions, or so it would appear.

Harford relates evidence from research papers into these pay-to-bid auctions. In one paper:

Three economists find that irrational – or perhaps simply risk-loving – bidders seem to concentrate on game consoles. The bids in other auctions look rational and are not especially lucrative.

And another:

the typical Swoopo item raises about 50 per cent more revenue than its price on Amazon. This may not be a grotesque profit margin, but it is certainly handsome.

But finally:

Both studies conclude that many, perhaps most, Swoopo auctions lose money, but that Swoopo makes up for this because some auctions are very profitable indeed. So perhaps Swoopo is a “hack of the human mind”. Augenblick can identify what the hack is, too: it takes advantage of what economists call the sunk cost fallacy. Bidders get sucked in, refusing to quit once they feel committed by having made a few bids.

Is It A Scam?

Because of its strange model, it’s open to some accusations of being a scam. The Register ran a piece on Swoopo (“eBay’s more evil twin”) at the start of 2009, and explained how Swoopo could be run as an extremely profitable scam:

Since there’s no verification to the rest of the community that the winning bidder actually collected the item he or she won, we would write a program that automatically up-bids the auctions, to keep the paying customers paying. Keep upbidding until the meatspace users give up and “collect” the item. We wouldn’t even need inventory. If users start to get wise to the swindle, plant a few fake bloggers to talk about how they got an awesome deal on a plasma TV from Swoopo or simply dial back the bot and let a few users win the auctions.

If it was a scam, it’s unlikely that it would have lasted as long, at least we hope so. In fact, it is more like gambling. Sure, you’ll get a bargain every now and again, but more often than not you’ll lose out. It’s a lot like the lottery, in that respect.

Have you ever tried Swoopo? Let us know your experiences in the comments below.

Swoopo: Clever Auction Site or Just Pure Evil? was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

Via The Financial Services Club Blog.

Bank Bonuses “Infographic” was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

That’s right, even the unemployed have an iPhone app dedicated to them, thanks to an application developed by the Government.

The JobCentrePlus app allows job seekers to search and locate relevant jobs from the Government’s job centre database.

Unaffordable

Unsurprisingly though, the decision to spend taxpayers money on this app has come in for some criticism, with charities suggesting that most job centre visitors are unlikely to be able to afford the “Jesus phone”.

“The proposal is a waste of money, as the majority of people who need to go to the job centre cannot afford an iPhone – which costs hundreds of pounds to buy or alternatively comes with an expensive monthly phone tariff.” (Rob Tolan, Elizabeth Finn Care)

A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) responded:

“The application provides access to our jobs database and it does not mean you cannot access this without an iPhone. The database is also available on the web and via computers located in Job Centres.”

To be fair to the DWP, the iPhone app part of this project was probably not the expensive bit – pulling together the database of jobs and distributing it through web, mobile etc would not be a minor task in itself, and the app part is probably more about getting some PR by jumping on the iPhone bandwagon than anything else.

It’s worth noting that a similar application is also available for Android, although not much fuss has been made about that. Are Android phones much more affordable than iPhones?

Disregarding all of that, as an app, it’s actually pretty slick, without really having any brilliant functionality.

Features

Here’s what Directgov has to say about it:

• the app can be used by jobseekers in England, Wales and Scotland
• the app is free to download and available to anyone who uses an iPhone, an iPod touch, or a Google Android phone
• last month more than 60,000 people used web browsers on smart phones to visit the JCP jobsearch site – now you can download the app for an interface that is easier and quicker to use on your phone
• the JCP database is the largest in the UK – with over 10,000 new vacancies every working day
• more than 30 per cent of UK employers advertise their jobs with JCP

Once the app has opened, you can do a keyword search for jobs in a specific area, which can be typed in or picked up by your GPS signal.

Here’s what shows after searching for “plumber” jobs in Wolverhampton. It’s the first thing that came into my head, ok? Not very imaginative, I know.

Once you’ve selected a job, and found out more details about it, you can see exactly where it is on a map:

Applying for jobs

Unfortunately, there is no way to apply for the jobs through the app – you’ll have to phone up to do that. As well as searching by keyword, you can browse all jobs within a certain category, and you can save the details of jobs you’re interested in to come back to later, presumably when you’ve finished in the pub.

jobcentreplus is available now through iTunes. It’s also available for Android.

Unemployed? There’s An App For That… was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

You might think that taking financial advice from a Government that has dragged the country into a mountain of debt is like is a little like asking a Premiership footballer for marital advice.

But the Government has today launched a new service, Moneymadeclear, which offers “free financial advice” over the phone, on the web and face-to-face.

What’s it all about, Darling?

Alistair Darling launched the service, saying:

“Moneymadeclear is free, impartial advice for all, whether you are unsure about the small print in a mortgage form, want advice about opening a savings account for your children or grandchildren, or you want some help dealing with repayments before they get out of hand. This service will provide much needed advice for one million people across the UK in the coming year alone.”

The service is to be funded by money scrounged from dormant bank accounts, and follows “successful” tests in the North of England – what constitutes success, we’re not sure.

Here’s what the Moneymadeclear service offers:

• cope with changing circumstances, like a sudden drop in income;
• get the most out of a budget;
• save for a special event, or just a rainy day;
• borrow wisely;
• plan for retirement;
• understand tax and welfare benefits; and
• explain financial jargon.

If they don’t have the answer to your problem, then they’ll let you know of someone who can help, such as financial advisers or accountants. And their time won’t be free.

Whilst it’s difficult to argue against the intentions of the service, and it should help some people, Walletpop UK has hit the nail on the head with its analysis of the service:

Then they (the FSA) concluded that the reason people don’t understand is because they don’t have access to the information. And they’re completely wrong there. There are two reasons people are bad with money. The first is that they don’t understand, and the second is that they do understand but they choose to ignore the little voice in their head that tells them it’s not a good idea to spend their entire paycheck on a handbag.

So what’s the answer?

These people don’t need the information to be out there somewhere. They need nothing short of a qualified person forcing their way into their lounge, demanding they take action, and refusing to leave until they have drawn up a will, moved their utilities, got a decent bank account, established a debt-repayment plan, set up a pension, remortgaged and established an investment plan. This person needs to have no vested interest in the individual doing anything other than the very best thing for themselves, so will need to be paid by the government. So the solution is enforced financial advice and enforced savings.

It’s a radical theory, but probably pretty near to what is necessary than this half-hearted effort from the Government.

Over to you

What do you think of this new service? Would you use it? Let us know in the comments below.

Government Now Offering “Free Financial Advice” was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.

A few people have noticed that Google Finance has been having some problems recently, sporadically redirecting to the Hong Kong version of the site.

When you can get it to work correctly, Google Finance is a reasonable source of market information, with some useful historical data and graphing tools. It has had some criticism over the accuracy of data, and there are probably better sources of market news, but is generally pretty quick and largely free of ads, unlike other similar sites, such as Yahoo! Finance.

I’ve tried it a couple of times today, from different locations, and it worked fine in one place, and redirected in the other.

According to Chris Cathcart, there’s a redirect in place making this happen, which seems like a strange thing to do.

Anyone got any ideas why this might be the case?

As an aside, Google Chrome popped up with its new translate feature when I was presented with the Hong Kong version of Google Finance, so I tried it out, and it seemed to fare quite well:

(Click to enlarge)

Google Finance Redirecting To Hong Kong? was originally published at Money Watch a UK personal finance blog. Sign up to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter.