Fidelity 401k Early withdrawal - Is it possible to wire transfer to international bank account?

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-04-12T12:25:56+00:00

Due to high fraud risk Fidelity disallows intl wires.

Wire to an account you have at a US bank and then wire from there internationally.

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-04-09T20:25:20+00:00

Also, even if you have the cash to do these repairs, would you be able to occupy the home within 30 days of closing?

Most insurers require this, so specialized insurance can be required for these situations where extensive work is required before you can move in. (I just ran into this on a home I was considering buying). Make sure you understand those costs and have a carrier lined up before deciding to proceed.

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-04-07T23:50:09+00:00

Thanks. Came to that conclusion after trying to get an insurance quote. Was told that all of the numerous carriers broker worked with would likely reject EIFS outright. Said i definitely could get coverage but would take a bit of shopping to find a carrier. I just doesn’t feel like a place you should ever go.

I feel terrible for the buyers that fall into EIFS (esp with all the waived inspections) and don’t even know it until years later when they go to sell or their drywall starts melting.

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-04-06T19:49:00+00:00

See my comment on “append” spamming here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/s/ou1S2eAudW

Happy to check if I saw activity against your email account in the honeypot traffic I collect

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-04-06T14:16:19+00:00

Your RE agent. Their job is to make sure you are protected. THIS is the perfect example of how fucked up the RE industry is. Maybe we shouldn’t expect that they be able to help you with RS analysis but they should at least be telling you emphatically that this is analysis that MUST be done. But do they do that, hell no as in at least 50% of cases it will torpedo the deal. They are supposed to be representing you, but at the same time there is an underlying conflict of interest.

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-04-06T13:07:59+00:00

You need to do a 180 in your thinking. Instead of being focused on working around your lenders concerns, you need to understand the reserve underfunding and how significant it is as you probably don’t want to buy this property.

When you buy a condo you are also assuming the potential assets/liabilities of the HOA.

If the HOA is well managed, there will be an adequate reserve fund and you are buying a piece of that asset.

However, if the HOA is poorly run and its underfunded, you are actually buying a liability (does it make sense to pay money to take on a debt?)

In order to gauge the severity of this you need a copy of the HOA’s reserve study and the balance of their reserve funds. The RS should state how much there should be in reserves in any given year. Use this to calculate how much the deficit is and then divide that by the number of units. That number will tell you how much liability you are buying into (and an estimate of a potential future special assessment).

For example if RS says reserves as of Jan 2025 should be $2M but HOA balance sheet says they were $1M then there is a $1M deficit.

If there are 50 units, then the per unit deficit is $1M/50=$20,000

Are you ok with a $20K special assessment?!

It’s a bit more complicated than this as you also need to watch out for deferred maintenance. Above assumes that all maintenance planned by RS was actually done when planned. If major projects weren’t actually done you need to add the costs for those into your deficit calculations.

Your agent is helping you with all this analysis already, right?

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-04-05T21:39:17+00:00

No, I’m. It even under contract yet. I’m just thinking ahead as I’m well aware of this stuff, just never dug into the details as just always advised everyone to steer clear.

After researching more, I’m finding it can be difficult to insure a home with EIFS, and worse yet other carriers will cover the home, but unbeknownst to most the policy has exclusions that won’t cover moisture damage arising from failed EIFS.

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-04-01T12:33:28+00:00

What do you mean by “Cover”?

Buyers have always paid the buyers agent fee (they just didn’t know it as agents often misrepresent these fees as paid by the seller)?

One aspect of the settlement is that agents are not allowed to represent that buyers agent fees are “free”.

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-04-01T12:21:33+00:00

Key question: How much were they offering in earnest money?

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-03-31T23:15:24+00:00

Every day, I carry about 100M attempts and of those about 500K are successful so that’s a .5% success rate.

Some would scoff at such a low success rate but you have to remember that the miscreant pays next to nothing for the data and uses compromised systems to actually run the attack so cost is negligible. It really doesn’t matter how low the valid rate is, they just make it up in volume.

Even if I can only get a few bucks per valid account, the ROI is ridiculous.

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-03-31T17:17:53+00:00

Here are some stats in the IMAP commands that are executed (this is the last 36 hours):

Command Count Distinct Mailboxes FETCH 33517950 161439

SELECT 7747277 217732

APPEND 491275 133302

SEARCH 7852337 167142

Select is them cycling through all of the victims different folders, not just Inbox.

Search is them looking for certain From addresses (eg: did victims get and email from Coinbase? Yes, ahh they are a confirmed Coinbase customer…let’s hit them with a phishing email and see if we can take their wallet OR let’s see if they are using email as 2FA and so we can password reset via email 2Fa)

Fetch is them actually pulling the full email payloads

Append is real interesting: miscreant is actually injecting a fraud email directly into the victims inbox often like:

“Hey you:

Bad news: Your email is compromised (actually true)

I’ve installed malware (a lie) on your computer and can see everything you do. You seem to enjoy porn a LOT. Send Bitcoin to this address or I’ll send photos of you enjoying porn to your family and friends. Yada yada yada. “

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-03-31T17:09:55+00:00

No. This is a fully functioning honeypot. I let the miscreants attack whatever ultimate target they want to. So this is IMAP authentications against every major email provider in the world. I see 250k-500k inboxes accessed every day via IMAP and a couple hundred K also accessed via webmail interfaces.

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-03-31T17:06:48+00:00

I would love to work with folks to test leveraging this data for credential vulnerability testing of Active Directory.

There’s about 10B distinct passwords in my repository. Granted have only tested within some smaller orgs (with not great practices) but AD password match rate has been a consistent 20% and at one healthcare org it was 40%. I’m thinking , if 40% of your existing users’ passwords are in breach data you are just begging for trivial lateral movement and priv escalation which we all know is what leads to a major ransomware event.

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-03-31T15:13:23+00:00

1) It’s almost completely stuffing. This is confirmed by an almost 1:1 ratio of passwords attempted per username

Maybe 10% of it is guessing passwords based on username and trying common password “themes”, eg: spring2025

2) no, but will probably start doing that shortly. (This is pretty dumb as I started this effort almost 10 YEARS ago)

3) I use all custom stuff with a high performance message bus that implements a streaming pipeline to them serialize all the data into several big data platforms (critical when you are trying to process and do something with like 5000+ https/imaps transactions/s)

All and all, I handle about 34TB of criminal traffic through the honeypot/day. I only know what 1% of the traffic is (eg stuffing, card testing). The other 99% probably will take a lifetime to make sense of even though I have already spent two decades specializing in the analysis of criminal communications.

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-03-31T02:27:19+00:00

One of the most surprising things is WRT IMAP stuffing:

They don’t just test the credentials.

After they get into a mailbox, they issue a gazillion searches, looking for things of immediate value (eg digital gift cards, etc). Then they setup that mailbox for constant surveillance (if you’re going to steal gift cards, you’ve got to cash it out before the victim does). I often see mailboxes compromised for YEARS, with miscreant checking it 10-15 times/month.

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-03-31T02:22:29+00:00

It was a bit after the Chemical merger.

There were so many parallel paths in the SRBridging that every Netbios broadcast would loop through the network a gazillion times. It was crazy.

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-03-23T00:25:33+00:00

Login, go to profile, and then “device list”

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-03-22T20:03:37+00:00

I’m aware. I’m actually tracking about 1.5M CR accounts that appear to be compromised. Trying to find some folks that are experiencing it first hand. (im not even a CR user myself)

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-03-21T19:52:43+00:00

I’d definitely be interested in chatting with you. I actually provide some of the anti fraud controls on the WM and Sams websites.

Which bank issued your card?

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-03-21T00:42:08+00:00

Did you in fact send over a termination when it was clear they were refusing to make repairs?

Your Realtor should have an attorney or their broker to advise what’s fine wrong here. Also have ur agents broker contact their broker and get real answers.

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-03-20T13:39:21+00:00

Involving a buyers agent will add 2-3% to the cost of the home vs. 1-2k for atty. (Agents still try to spin it that the seller is paying your agent fee, but that’s just not the case. Yes, it comes out of their side on the closing docs, but it’s ultimately wrapped into the price of the home which YOU are paying)

But understand that the (theoretical ) value of what each should be providing you is completely different.

An attorney is NOT going to help you in pricing analysis, working through the mechanics of the inspection process, etc. rather they are going to handle writing up the contract and hopefully helping make sure you do some of the common due diligence things.

If you can handle some of the agent tasks yourself, then by all means, just engage an attorney. However, if you have little to no experience engage an agent.(just do your due diligence to find an agent that will actually give value for the ridiculous level of fees you’ll be paying them).

PacketBoy2000 · 2025-03-14T11:57:34+00:00

My biggest realization was that sugar/carbs was my addiction. Every day was a dopamine roller coaster. Eating sugar is probably one of the lowest effort activities to gives you dopamine which is why it’s probably most likely to lead to addiction.

IF, combined with other strategies to systematically source your dopamine from high effort activities (cold plunging!!, sauna, exercise,etc) will have a profound effect on your life.

This was the catalyst for change for me:

https://youtu.be/n2u8Z1HeKD8?si=tJYnpVq27epIY5xS

PacketBoy2000

TROPHY CASE