#2 Bank Account Takeover Fraud
Bank account takeover fraud is a form of identity theft that happens when a criminal uses your personal login information to login to your financial accounts. From there, the criminal can cause a lot of damage before you even notice it happening. They can send money out to a new payee, withdraw funds directly, leverage the personal information on your account to open other accounts in your name, etc. They can even change the login and address credentials to lock you out of the account while they drain your account. This effective prevents you from having the ability to stop the account withdrawals from happening quickly.
What can you do to limit your exposure to bank account takeover?
- Use a strong, unique password for each financial account login. It’s never a wise decision to continually use the same password for each of your separate accounts. Look at it this way, if that’s your method for login credentials, if a criminal has one financial account password, then the criminal has all of them. It would be incredibility devastating if a criminal could log into all of your financial accounts. Therefore, it’s pertinent to use unique and strong passwords that are unique to each account.
- Change your financial account passwords frequently. We recommend that you change your passwords quarterly to thwart those who have already gained access to your account information but have yet to use it. One of the best ways to remember to do this is by setting up a calendar reminder that is recurring once every three months.
- Keep a watchful eye on your accounts. You would think that it is common practice to balance your credit card and bank statements each month, but with many of us having such hectic lives, many people just briefly glance over the statements for any suspect large purchases. What is commonly seen by those who are victimized by bank account takeover is a series of smaller purchases in the beginning to fly under the radar and then the criminal takes the cake with a large purchase.
- Don’t let social media be the cause for bank account takeover. Often when criminals have sought to use your financial account login credentials, they have everything they need but sometimes, if you have some type of two-factor authentication or security question, they will need additional information.
A place that the criminal might easily find this information is on your social media accounts – where you willingly share your date of birth, make connections with your mother who happens to have her maiden name on her account, and your phone number. All of this information facilitates the criminal’s nefarious intentions. So, limit the amount of personal information that you share on your social media accounts as it will save you pain in the long run.
Credit monitoring will not alert you to this type of fraud.
LibertyID will take the following steps for/with their members:
- Contact the financial institution where the takeover happened and make sure the accounts have been frozen.
- Keep in communication with the financial institution during the investigative period.
- Place fraud alerts at all three credit reporting agencies.
- Place credit freezes at all three credit reporting agencies, if appropriate.
- File report with FTC.
- If their identity theft involved the use of your driver’s license number, Social Security Number, or another type of identification, will we contact the relevant agencies to notify them of the theft.
- Review credit reports with the victim to ensure there is no other types of fraud.
- Provide single bureau credit monitoring with alerts for 12 months.
- LibertyID will ensure that the restoration is completed with the victim.
- Periodically contact the member throughout the 12 months following resolution of their ID theft recovery case if warranted.