Identity thieves and scammers can use credit cards, financial statements, or utility bills, or other important paperwork to obtain and exploit your personal information. Your first line of defense to keep this theft from happening in the first place is to destroy documents containing your personal information before anyone can access them. Private documents and credit/debit cards, which contain sensitive information, should be destroyed as soon as you no longer need them.

Join Us for Community Financial’s Annual Shred Day!

If you are looking for a way to securely shred and destroy your old documents, bring them to our Shred Day event this September on Saturday the 10th! We will have trucks on site to securely shred documents at 4 of our branch locations this year:

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With 86% of the American population utilizing ATMs each year, it’s more important than ever to brush up on ATM safety. Unfortunately, scammers are everywhere—and using a compromised machine can mean risking identity theft and/or having cash stolen.

Here at Community Financial, we take our members’ safety very seriously. We use multiple protective measures to keep you, your information and your money safe when you use one of our ATMs. However, it’s important for you, as the member, to be aware of basic ATM safety so your transactions are never compromised. As with all banking platforms, you are the first and best defense for protecting your personal information and your money. Here are 10 tips to help you keep your ATM transactions completely secure.

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Robocalls have got to be one the most annoying inventions of the 21st century. Unfortunately, those phone calls can do a lot more than disrupt your dinner to send you running to the phone just to hear about an offer for an extended warranty on your car. Using sophisticated spoofing methods and dogged persistence, they can swindle unsuspecting targets out of hundreds, or even thousands of dollars, using nothing but a phone. In fact, according to data from Trucaller, Americans lost close to $30 billion to phone scams in 2020.

Technology has made it far too easy and cheap for scammers to place a huge number of robocalls in seconds. New robocall platforms can make up to 5,000 simultaneous calls a second for as little as a dollar. Even if only 10 of these phone calls have their desired effect on the targets, the scammers have pulled in a solid profit. 

Here’s what you need to know about phone scams and how to avoid them. 

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In our digital world, passwords are as much a part of our lives as Netflix and Amazon. Keeping information stored in dozens of accounts across the web can make it easier to stay on top of your finances, order a new pair of jeans, or even schedule a dentist appointment. Unfortunately, passwords can be relatively easy for scammers to hack, opening the door for identity theft, credit card fraud, and more. Here’s where multifactor authentication (MFA) comes into play. As a means of securing your information, MFA provides an extra layer of protection for your accounts and sensitive data. 

Here’s all you need to know about MFA, how it works, and why it’s an important step in protecting your information. 

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With many families still working and attending school online from their homes, we are using more and more data. While the flexibility of being able to do so much from home is an amazing leap in communication technology, it also increases the possibility of our personal information getting into the wrong hands. The last thing you want at the end of the day is to find out your information has been stolen.

To protect you and your family while online, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission offers these tips:

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With states continuing to work toward reopening, as usual, scammers aren’t far behind. Keep your finances safe and watch out for these trending scams as the country continues to reopen:

Account Takeovers

Shorter hours and percentage-capacity rules mean many consumers are still shopping remotely. This leads to an increase in online retail scams like account takeovers, where scammers hack a company’s database to break into a customer’s account. Using the customer’s remembered payment information, the scammer goes on to place large orders to their own address — all on the client’s dime.

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