!*TWEETING BANKING TROUBLES*?

Customers who use social media to vent frustration at their banks when services go down are inadvertently making themselves targets for fraudsters, law enforcement officials and industry insiders said.

That was the case for customers of Britain's TSB, many of whom took to to social media to complain after a computer systems migration by the bank that left thousands of users locked out of their accounts.

The bank's chief executive on Wednesday said TSB saw the daily rate of attempted fraud on its customers spike up to seventy times following the outage and that around 1300 customers had money taken from their accounts.

A person familiar with TCB's investigations into recent frauds said that while it can be difficult for the bank to know for certain how criminals obtain information about an account, activity on social media is of concern.

When accounts are compromised, it's usually because a customer gives up their details and a ''lot of that is entirely voluntary through social media,'' the person said.

TSB spokeswoman Supreet Thomas said the bank encourages customers to be careful about how much personal information they share online.

''The more information made available on these sites, the easier it becomes for fraudsters to steal your identity,'' she said.

Security specialists say news events like the TSB outage are the perfect hook for scammers, largely because people using social media may identify themselves as a customer of a given form making it easier for them to defraud.

''Consumers - or people - are always going to be the weakest link, so if they find ways to to attack the customer then they will go after that,'' said Mark Nocolls, director of  UK-based cyber security firm Redscan.

TSB's botched computer-systems migration have cost around 70 million pounds {$93.95 million} so far, its Spanish parent Sabadell said on Thursday.

The issue has also prompted a regulatory investigation and criticism of its chief executive.

A panel of  British lawmakers said Thursday they had lost confidence in TSB's CEO, Paul Pester.

The Honor and Serving of the  latest Global operational Research on Banking Frauds, Fraudsters, and Law continues to Part 2.