In one The New York Times Last week, Tara Siegel Bernard reported a story about acats transfer fraud from a vanguard IRA. If you are not familiar with acats fraud, the short summary is that a thief:
- Learn from a brokerage account where you have somewhere (including account number).
- Fraudulous opens a new brokerage account somewhere else, in your name, with your information.
- With that second company, the thief starts an acats transfer to have assets transferred directly from your real account to their fraudulent account in your name.
- The thief then liquidates those assets and moves the money to a bank account that they check.
Because ACAT transfers are automated, the whole thing can occur fairly quickly as soon as the thief has the information they need.
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