Latest Email Scam Involves Federal Credit Unions
The latest installment in what seems like an endless stream of email scams, targets an entity we haven’t seen yet: credit unions.
Just this morning we received an email with a subject that read: “Important Notification.”
Here’s what the email looked like:
You have 1 new ALERT message
Please login to your Treasury Department Federal Credit Union Online Login and visit the Message Center section in order to read the message.To Login, please click the link below:
Treasury Department Federal Credit Union Online Banking
Copyright © 2009 Treasury Department Federal Credit Union
In our previous post on email fraud we warned that when you hover over the link in which they want you to click, you’ll notice that the link appears differently on the bottom of your screen than in the email itself. However, this morning’s fraudulent link looked very legit.
Don’t Be Fooled
We visited the Treasury Department’s Federal Credit Union website where it’s written in bold on the homepage that:
The Treasury Department Federal Credit Union does not email or text message members or potential members requesting information or a response about their accounts. For your own protection, do not provide your Treasury Department Federal Credit Union account information in response to any email or text message you receive. If you receive an email or text message about your account with the Treasury Department Federal Credit Union, as a precaution, please contact us prior to responding at (800) 344-4497 to verify the request. Please send a copy of the text message or any suspicious web site links to the email address below tdfcu_alert@tdfcu.com.
DO Not provide your debit or credit card number, PIN, expiration date or any account information in response to a computer generated call claiming to be from the Treasury Department Federal Credit Union. DO NOT respond to the computer generated calls. If you receive one of these calls and are not sure what to do, please contact us immediately at the numbers listed below.
The Treasury Department Federal Credit Union does not send out emails with attachments requesting that you download information onto your computer. If you receive a request that appears to be from the Treasury Department Federal Credit Union with an attachments requesting that you downloading information to your computer for security, DO NOT DO IT
