Phishing Scams by phone or e-mail

Beware of phishing attempts over the phone and by e-mail. Phishing is a scam that involves Internet criminals who try to trick people into giving up personal information (such as credit card numbers, PINs, financial accounts or other sensitive information).
Phishing scams involve a phone call where criminals attempt to extract personal information from you over the phone with you selecting a course of numbers on the phone pin pad. The callers use telephone solicitation and telephone call back techniques to prey upon your trust for telephone-based fraud alerts from your financial institution.
It's important to be aware of some common traits of phishing:

• Requests involving the use of names of businesses or persons that would be trusted.
• Creating a sense of urgency to respond (winning a prize or money)
• Indicating consequences that make you act quickly without thinking -- like losing access to your financial account, your e-Bay account or getting arrested because you failed to show up for jury duty.

Many e-mail phishing attempts have misspellings and grammatical errors.
A recent trend has been to play on events in the news that have generated public concern. For example, there is a current phishing e-mail that appears to be from the NCUA and related to the TJX (Marshall's, TJ Maxx, Home Goods) data security breach, which was in the news in January. The false e-mail discusses the TJX breach, warning that "magnetic strip information was being stored and your PIN may have been captured". It strongly urges "NCUA's members" to update their information within the next 48 hours by clicking on a link provided in the email to "verify their credit union registration".

Another phishing email that appears to be from the NCUA asks recipients to email or fax their Social Security Numbers and credit and debit card numbers so that the agency can update their database to monitor accounts to foil previous fraud attempts. As with all other phishing e-mails, the criminals who generated these have been sending them to millions of email addresses, not knowing whether the recipients' information was or was not part of the TJX compromise and not knowing whether the recipients are members of credit unions. If you don't respond, they won't have your information.

Other phishing emails are designed to load malicious software on your computer to gather information or just to do damage. The best ways to avoid compromising your computer's security via this type of email are to ensure that you keep updated anti-virus software on your computer and avoid opening emails unless you know the sender and have confidence in their ability to maintain the security of their systems. Be careful of e-mails with attachments in particular.