Latest e-mail scam claims to be from Dearborn credit union

By Laura Hipshire
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

Attention, Dearborn residents. There’s a new e-mail scam that could be coming soon to your personal computer, so beware.

This latest scam involves fake e-mails claiming to be coming from a local credit union.

“Renew your account,” the subject line says, but these e-mails are definitely not from a local credit union, they’re courtesy of a conartist trying to access residents’ personal bank account information.

The e-mails claim that he recipient’s account with the financial institution has been suspended and that the recipient must complete an “account update” before the account will be unlocked.

Don’t click!
A link to click on is provided for the supposed “account update.” An e-mail such as this is an example of “phishing”—an Internet scam in which con artists coax people to disclose sensitive personal identification and financial information such as social security, bank account, or credit card numbers.

“People should not respond to this e-mail in any way or to any e-mail claiming to be from a financial institution that asks for this type of information,” says Mayor John B. O’Reilly, Jr.

“Not even the best Internet filtering services—which try to weed out these types of scams and other junk email— can catch all of them, so it’s up to each individual to be his or her best line of defense against con artists,” O’Reilly says.

What are phishing scams, anyway?
Criminals send fake e-mails—sometimes to millions of people—that are designed to appear to come from a bank or business that they might have accounts with. The message’s sole purpose is to gather that sensitive personal identity and financial information described earlier.