American in Spain

Banking Security

June 9, 2010
Fourteen Thousand Euros

Today I went to my bank to pay my Spanish taxes, which, after avoiding double taxation, came to a whopping 4.87€. I had done the taxes on my computer with the downloadable java app and had generated a PDF for myself and one for my wife. However, when I printed them, they came out strangely formatted. I couldn't understand why, so I loaded the PDFs onto a USB pen drive and took them to the bank along with the poorly printed versions. They said that my printed versions weren't good enough and agreed to print the ones I had on my pen drive. So I watched as my local banker inserted the pen drive I gave him into his Windows machine and opened and printed the PDFs. This strikes me as a huge security faux pas. He has seen me come into the bank over the past five years, granted, but still. He took a pen drive from a customer and double clicked on an icon on it that had an Adobe Acrobat icon. If I was a little smarter and a little more evil, I could now have access to his entire workstation, on the internal banking network.

My intentions were completely honest, and the guy helped me out...but talk about the future of bank robberies! Who needs a gun and a getaway driver when you can use a pen drive and show a little cleavage? My shirt was fully buttoned, but were one to take this to the professional level, I have little doubt that plan would be more successful with the role of in-bank operative played by an attractive woman.

From my experience with American banks, I can't really imagine them opening files on a diskette solid state storage device that a customer brought in, but it might be possible.

Has anyone seen any crime novels, movies, or television episodes with this modus operandi?