ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — This year PSCU believes credit unions should tighten member authentication standards at the branch and call centers.
"We are seeing more attacks by fraudsters to get information out of the credit union," said Steve Ruwe, chief risk officer. "The data compromises continue to be prevalent. The fraudsters work their way into the call center to get the pieces of information they are missing to fill out the data they need to put together a fraud attempt."
Ruwe recommended that credit unions focus on how they authenticate members when they call in and train reps not to be worked for data. He said that might mean having staff ask more complex authentication questions, asking for phrases as opposed to member data that might be available on the Internet; also insisting that staff carefully follow all authentication rules no matter what story the person on the other end of the phone delivers.
"This is something credit unions need to pay more attention to in 2011," noted Ruwe. "These efforts by fraudsters will be more prevalent going forward."
