BrowserUk, I'm always happy to see your posts here. You clearly have a good grasp of Perl techniques and how to apply them and you're one of the users here that I've learned a lot from, but, IMO, you jumped the gun on this one.

Now, I am not a Chase customer and I don't use online access to my bank, but I could immediatly see multiple legitimate uses for someone who does access their account information online to want to automate that process. Aside from the OP's stated reason of aggregating multiple accounts into a single "family financial portal" page, two other legitimate uses which immediately come to mind would be to periodically monitor (via cron or some Windows equivalent) your balance(s) and send yourself email if they drop below some threshold or to download a transaction history for import into whatever home financial program one might use (e.g., QuickBooks or the like).

Granted, a lot of sites (financial and otherwise) don't really like people scraping their sites, so that's probably not the best way to go about it if there are other options, but there aren't always other options1 and, even if there are, scraping tends to be the most obvious way to get information from a site, since it's essentially taking the way the user interacts with a site and duplicating it in code.

The OP said nothing to indicate that he intended to try to obtain new login credentials for the site, whether by brute-force or other means. I see nothing there to indicate that he wants to do anything other than to make automated use of login credentials which he already uses manually, which rather strongly implies that he already has said credentials. (Even if they're not legitimate, he can already use them and, therefore, already do as much damage as he likes through their (mis)use.) If you see anything specific which gives you the impression of nefarious intent ("specific" as opposed to "it involves financial information, therefore it must be for fraudulent purposes"), please point it out, because I'm not seeing it.

Like the OP, I agree with you that the world is pretty messed up at present. I also agree with him - and your signature - that one of the major problems is the existing "oppressive environment of political correctness and risk aversion" in which generalized paranoia causes many to heavily question others' motives and jump to negative conclusions on the slightest provocation.

1 cf. my recent post Net::Google replacement? and the apparent lack of a legitimate alternative to scraping Google at this time

In reply to Re^2: Trying to download account balance by dsheroh
in thread Trying to download account balance by n8g

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