Last night I was lounging in my loft jamming to the new version of "All I Want For Christmas" by Mariah Carey and Justin Bieber (ugh, I know right?) when I received the most curious text message.
SHOCK. I got slighlty panicky until I realized a few key things:
- My credit union credit card expired months ago. i did it on purpose so that I could pay it of without spending any more money on it.
- The number that it asked me to contact was a 254 area code - the same area code as my phone number, which is zoned for Waco, Texas, where I went to college. My credit union doesn't have any branches in Waco.
- While the digits of my credit card info were correct, I don't think any reputable financial institution would send out such sensitive information freely in a text message.
- "THE CREDIT UNION ALERT CENTER" sounds so urgent that I assumed that it must be fake.
And I was right. I googled the term "credit union alert center" and got these results:
Total fraud alert.
Of course I alerted my credit union and didn't respond to the attack. Does your credit union have a set of policies in place to deal with phishing scams? How do you educate your members on how to spot fraud? Let me know in the comments!
DeAndre