Fraud Alert
Criminals continue to find new ways to scam individuals for their personal information or money. The best tool that any consumer can use to prevent being scammed is awareness. Be aware of anything that seems suspicious or sounds too good to be true. If a company is contacting you about business you do with them, you should not have to provide them with user names, passwords, credit, debit or account numbers, or social security numbers. If you are contacted through phone, email, or mail, and the correspondence seems suspicious, do not give out any information.
Telephone:
Con artists sometimes use a telephone scam to try to get your personal information. They will call and pretend to be a legitimate company, such as a financial institution or credit card company, and ask you to verify your information with them. If you are 60 or older, you may be a special target for people trying to collect personal information by phone.
Mail:
You just won $10,000 from an overseas lottery! All you have to do is deposit the check and wire a portion back to cover taxes and fees. Sound too good to be true? Well it is. This is a common scam and criminals have continued to change the stories, but the concept is the same. Deposit the check, wire money, and then the check then comes back days after the wire has been sent and is fraudulent. You are still responsible for the money that you wired, even though the check was fraudulent. If you receive something like this, talk to your bank before taking any action.
Email:
This is often times called “phishing”. Criminals will send out emails pretending to be a financial institution to large numbers of people, trying to collect sensitive personal information such as usernames, passwords, debit, credit card, or account numbers, or social security numbers. First Community Bank will not contact you via email and ask for any personal information. If you receive an email that looks like it came from First Community Bank asking for personal information, please contact us.
First Community Bank will never contact you through phone, email or mail requesting your personal information. Never give out information unless you have initiated the call to the main bank phone number.
For information on Identity Theft and how to protect yourself, click here.
