A Note from our CEO, Scott Soderberg

 

 

We live in an amazing technological age. The answer to almost any question you might have can be found in your pocket. Artificial intelligence is advancing at lightning speed and has already moved from merely taking over menial tasks to the point where its capabilities are expanding the frontiers of humanity’s knowledge daily. You can’t read an article about AI without mention of a day when it will be able to “think” for itself.

Like almost all other major technical advances throughout human history, advanced digital capability arrives as a mixed blessing; the prospect of engineers improving the human condition coupled with the propensity for bad actors to leverage it for evil. Unfortunately, the latter group is wreaking havoc on all of us, in the form of perpetrating fraud through texts, emails, social media and phone calls. We see this daily here at the bank, and it is only getting more frequent.

I am far from a tech expert, but through our customers’ experiences, the continuing cyber education required, and the steady stream of professional advice we must consume, I’ve come to believe there are a few very basic practices that can greatly reduce your chances of falling victim to fraudsters:

  1. I think the bad guys probably have nearly everyone’s personal information by now, along with a mind-boggling amount of our usernames and passwords. The data breaches that continue at a rapid pace simply are too numerous and extensive for that not to be the case. For that reason, changing your passwords frequently and when ANYTHING suspicious occurs on an account is the simplest way to frustrate hackers—they’ll simply move on to the next set of stolen credentials. There are many excellent password management tools out there (Bitwarden is great) that make it much easier to change your passwords and store all your credentials safely in one place. Also, you should learn about and enable Multi-Factor Authentication on all your accounts—it’s a brick wall that will also make crooks look for an easier target;
  2. Stolen personal information enables the fraudsters to apply for credit in your name. To succeed in doing that, their phony credit application must go through one of the credit reporting agencies (TransUnion, Experian, Equifax). By simply freezing your credit at each of these agencies, you prevent this from happening. It is very easy to do, and you can also temporarily unfreeze it when applying for credit yourself; and
  3. Anytime you receive a request to give information or do something that is in any way suspicious or unexpected, don’t click on anything or call any number contained within the message. Go separately to the known website or call the known number for the account to verify the request is legitimate.
While these are only a few of the many ways you can protect yourself from cyber fraud, I believe they are the easiest methods to thwart most fraud attempts. Think of it as simply looking for the hole in the apple.