Even A Banker Can Be The Victim Of A Banking Scam
by Jason
(California)
It’s almost embarrassing to admit this, but I was the victim of internet bank fraud while I worked at a bank.
I lived in a small town in California, and I worked for a local bank that only had a small number of branches (less than a dozen limited to one small county.)
I had just opened a new account that I intended to use for online bill pay, so I was not surprised to receive an email claiming to be from the bank.
It instructed me to follow a link to the main banking website and verify my information. I clicked on the link, and the site looked exactly as I expected it to look.
They asked me for my name, contact info, account numbers, and social security number, and I gave it willingly.
I wondered briefly if this was a safe thing to do, but I decided that it was highly unlikely that a bank as small and localized as the one I worked at would be used to commit Internet fraud. After all, there are hundreds of millions of emails in the world, and only a few thousand customers at my bank.
Well, as it turned out, someone somewhere was hoping I would be thinking this way; I was the unwitting victim of a phishing scam. The website I went to was a counterfeit, and the information I entered was quickly collected by the scammers and used to drain my accounts within hours.
I didn’t realize that these people target small banks exactly because their members can’t imagine that they are being scammed.
It turns out that people from all over the world received the same email that I received, but most ignored it because they had never heard of my bank. Unfortunatly, I and several other members happened to receive the email as well, and we fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
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