Banking & Finance: E-Banking Comes With Rewards And Risks
Hometown Bank Posts "No Phishing" Sign
BY Livia Gershon
Worcester Business Journal Staff Writer
While customers are increasingly comfortable with online banking because of its convenience, financial institutions - particularly smaller community banks - are facing the risks of operating online.
Oxford-based Hometown Bank got hit this month with a common scam known as "phishing." Area residents, both Hometown customers and others, received e-mail messages claiming to be from the bank and requesting account information.
Bank spokesman Joe Klimavich said whoever was running the scam could use information provided by customers to create a duplicate ATM card.
"These guys are pretty wily," he said. "They don't call them criminals for nothing. And they're rather sophisticated in their techniques."
Land Down Under
Klimavich said the e-mails offered recipients money for filling out a survey and directed them to web pages designed to look similar to the Hometown's site.
"The link that I followed went to a web address in New Zealand, and was clearly not Hometown Bank's address," he said. "A careful consumer would recognize that it was not our web site."
Klimavich noted that the scam does not involve the theft of any information on bank customers and instead relies on reaching a large pool of people who might be customers. He said the scam also could not allow unauthorized access to Hometown's online banking system since accounts in the system are protected with passwords and constantly changing three-digit codes that require customers to refer to a matrix.
Klimavich said he could not comment on how many people may have been scammed by the phishing e-mails, but he said that before the scam hit, the bank had already been actively informing customers about watching for suspicious messages.
Klimavich said the bank worked closely with the Sturbridge Police, who filed reports on the scam with monitoring agencies.
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