How NOT to bank overseas

25 days left and counting. Last night, I decided to read the latest traveller's news on Thailand from the bulettin boards at thorntree.lonelyplanet.com. I learned that southern Thailand has almost recovered from the Tsusami a year ago (Yay), the guesthouse rates in Bangkok have skyrocketed, and how NOT to do my banking overseas.

Sure enough, I'll be stocking up on calling cards to do my banking. I spent an hour reading about hi-tech theives who scam on the tourists that bank at internet cafes. The scam works like this: the theivies use a spyware program called keylogger to save all your keystokes from the moment you login. After you leave, all your keystokes including passwords are saved to a text file which can be retrieved to steal your money, or credit card information. The scam is hard to beat. The recommended solutions are to bring your own computer to bank with (I'm not bringing a laptop on this trip!), or reinstall the operating system on the computer you will do banking on. Quickly scanning, and disabling processes using alt-cntl-delete to find the keylogger program is not foolproof.