Crooks Prefer Phishing in CU Waters

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Schools Financial CU was able shut down a telephone scam last week after an unknown con artist tried to lure members and non-members into disclosing personal financial information, the latest of rash of phishing expeditions to hit credit unions. Over the past month attempt to glean personal information from members through phishing schemes have been reported at dozens of credit unions, including Del Norte CU, Steinbeck CU, Kauai Community FCU, HawaiiUSA FCU, Hawaiian Tel FCU, Arizona State CU, Snohomish County PUD CU, Auburn University FCU, Taunton CU, Rockland CU, and even NCUA. “It’s becoming an epidemic,” one credit union executive who has been hit twice so far this year, told The Credit Union Journal Friday. In one of last week’s schemes, someone posing as a representative of Schools Financial CU tried to get members to call into a toll-free number to update their credit card accounts. A recent study by online security firm Cyveillance found an explosion of phishing attacks in just the first few months of this year, with banks and insurance companies reporting a tripling of attacks in January and February, compared to the same period last year. But credit unions saw almost a six-fold increase, 584%, over last year. As a result, phishing and other malware (virus) attacks are rapidly approaching robberies at the biggest source of losses for credit unions. In just the first two months of the year, phishing attacks grew by 50% and malware attacks by 200%, the Cyveillance study found. Those attacks helped put more than one million suspected stolen social security numbers on the Internet, in the same two months.