Fraud Prevention Tips

Here’s what we’re doing:

• Access to your information is restricted to employees with specific business purposes. Our employees are trained to maintain confidentiality and member privacy.
• We do not share your information with third parties except as required or allowed by law and as necessary to provide you with services.
• To protect your information Kings Federal Credit Union maintains physical, electronic and procedural safeguards that comply with federal regulations and leading industry practices.
• Our systems are equipped with computer virus protection, intrusion detection and firewalls, which block access by unauthorized individuals or networks.
• Our Online Banking is VeriSign (SSL) certified, which means information exchanged with any address beginning with “https” is encrypted before it is transmitted.

What You Can Do to Protect Yourself

• Enter your personal information only on secure Web sites. Look for a “lock” on the browser or “https” at the beginning of the Web site address to ensure the site is secure.
• Never respond to emails asking you for your personal banking or credit card information.
• Never use email to send your confidential information, since internet email is not secure. To send us a secure message use the Contact Us area of this website.
• Do not open emails if you don’t recognize the sender’s name. When in doubt, delete!
• Change passwords regularly using a mixture of upper and lower case characters and numbers. Use passwords that are not easily guessed. Do not share password information with anyone. Do not use the same passwords for multiple websites. See below for more tips on avoiding easily deciphered emails and creating strong passwords.
• Be wary of promotional scams. Identity thieves may use phony offers to get you to give them your personal information.
• Update anti-virus software and security patches to your system software regularly.
• Review your credit report once a year.
• Tear up or shred any pre-approved credit offers that you do not want.
• Check your monthly statements to verify all transactions and notify your financial institution of any suspicious transactions.
• Be cautious about giving confidential information over the phone to callers you don’t know.
• Limit the amount of identification and the credit cards you carry.
• Identity thieves may steal mail, consider locking your mailbox.
• Report lost or stolen checks and credit cards immediately. In addition, report identity theft incidents to the credit bureaus (Experian, TransUnion and Equifax). Consider placing alerts or taking other actions suggested by the bureaus to protect your credit (please contact the bureaus directly for more information).
• Do not provide debit or credit card numbers or PIN in response to unsolicited email.

Password Tips:

A strong password is an important protection to help you have safer online transactions. Here are steps you can take to create a strong password. Some or all might help protect your online transactions:

• Length. Make your passwords at least eight or more characters.
• Complexity. Include letters, punctuation, symbols, and numbers. Use the entire keyboard and include punctuation, symbols and numbers. The greater the variety of characters in your password, the better. However, password hacking software automatically checks for common letter-to-symbol conversions, such as changing “and” to “&” or “to” to “2.”
• Variation. Change passwords frequently. Set an automatic reminder every three months to change your passwords to access your email, banking accounts, and credit card websites.
• Variety. Don’t use the same password for everything. Cybercriminals steal passwords on websites that have very little security, and then they use that same password and user name in more secure environments, such as banking websites.

There are many ways to create a secure password and below are some suggestions that might help you begin to develop a password and ways to remember it:

Example:

Start with a sentence

Passwords that are complex are safe

Remove spaces in the sentence
Passwordsthatarecomplexaresafe

Use shorthand or misspell word
Passwordsthatrcompleksrsafe

Add a number that is meaningful
Passwordsthatrcompleksrsafe1951 (Date of birth for example)

• The Insurance Journal has reported that to reduce cyber risk, individuals need to make sure passwords are tough-to-guess and difficult to determine for an amateur and professional hacker.

Cyber criminals use sophisticated tools that can rapidly decipher passwords. Avoid passwords that use the following protocol:

• Words spelled backwards
• Common misspellings, and abbreviations
• Sequences or repeated characters. (Ex: 12345678, 222222, abcdefg, or adjacent letters on your keyboard – QWERTY).
• Personal information – your name, birthday, driver’s license, passport number, or similar information.

For more information call The Federal Trade Commission at 877-438-4338.