My Betfair account was hacked! Looking for security advice,
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So i logged into my Betfair account earlier and my balance was only 0.24p (I had about £109 in there). I looked at my withdrawal history and someone had played some roulette with my balance and then withdrawn everything except for 24p! I’ve reported it with Betfair who are investigating it. Fortunately, I’m currently only testing/paper-trading so I only had the £109 in my Betfair account, but what if I’d had a couple of thousand in there! I was wondering if this has happened to anyone else and whether Betfair reimbursed you? Also, does anyone have any security advice? If you’ve got a large sum of money sat in your Betfair account what steps do you take to keep it secure?
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I use Bitwarden which you can have as an app on your phone or an extension to your browser. It's really good because it saves all your log in, creates passwords, keeps 2FA, etc.
I'm sure there are loads that do something similar. It's a pain to go through all your passwords and make them more secure, but considering the potential downside it's worth doing.
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The exact same thing has happened to a mate of mine recently, Betfair gave him to money back in the end but they said they don't usually as apparently it was his fault his password was so easy to guess.
I hope they get this sorted the same way for you and like others have said 2FA on is the best way.
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@Adam I wasn’t aware of the 2-step authentication facility, but now I’ve read about it on Betfair’s site I’m 100% going to be enabling it! I’m actually glad this has happened while I only had a relatively trivial amount in my account; it would have been a nightmare if I’d had a couple of grand in there! It’d probably be good to do a brief video on Betfair security making people aware of 2-step authentication for when they’re trading with a bigger bank-roll. Thanks for the info, Adam!
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@Tony-Lee Do you have 2-factor authentication enabled? If not, make sure you enable it immediately.
Not only will that make your account more secure but also, I believe Betfair will refuse to reimburse you if you don't have it switched on.
Obviously make sure you use a strong password as well. The strongest passwords are actually passphrases with clusters of 3 or 4 random words with spaces between them. 1Password have a good guide to this here. This makes it unfeasible for a password cracker to guess your password in any reasonable length of time.
