Hacked Bank Account

What Lopez calls his nightmare began April 6, when he logged on to check on a wire transfer he was expecting. As head of Ahlo Inc., a five-person company in the Doral area of Miami-Dade that buys and sells printer ink and toner, Lopez often wires money to and receives transfers from U.S. and Latin American companies.

When he checked his account, Lopez found that $90,348.65 had been wired to Parex Bank in Riga, Latvia -- without his approval. "I thought I was going to throw up," he said.

According to the complaint filed on Thursday, about $20,000 of the money was withdrawn by the fraudulent recipient in Latvia. The rest, roughly $70,000, was frozen by Parex, where it remains.

The U.S. Secret Service, which investigates computer-based attacks on banks, sent Lopez a letter in November saying its "initial examination" had determined that a variant of a virus called coreflood had existed on his computer systems.

The letter noted that coreflood is malicious software code that can give an attacker remote access to the infected system, but it did not explicitly say coreflood was the cause of the loss. Representatives of the Secret Service Miami office were unavailable for comment Friday, and have previously declined to talk about the investigation.

The allegations in Lopez's complaint against the bank include breach of contract, negligence, breach of fiduciary duty, fraud and deceit, and intentional misrepresentation.

In this important case the court will decide the responsibility for the protection of online banking accounts. Lopez's computer was hacked and enabled the hacker access to his online bank account, from which he withdrew $90,000.

Florida courts are a bit flaky, but given the information provided, the bank has the responsibility to secure its customers' deposits. The court will have to determine if the bank is the least cost avoider of this breach, thus it had a fiduciary responsibility to safeguard his deposit, or whether Lopez was negligent in safeguarding his computer from hackers.