Cybersecurity Tips: 5 Ways Fraudsters Can Attack Your Identity Or Business

If you have a work email, shop online, or use a credit card or write checks - you could be exposed to identity theft, or your account being taken over. That list covers most of us.

Paul Tucker is the Chief Information Security Officer at BOK Financial, and he's sharing 5 ways fraudsters can attack your business.

Dave: So how do you keep people's information safe in your job, you have clients. People do banking as well as your employees, absolutely

Tucker: From the customer side, we sell trust, right? If they don't have trust in their financial institutions, they're not they're not going to want to continue to bank with us. And so from our perspective, we have workforce protections, we have operations protections, and we have customer protections.

Dave: It's interesting because we've done these stories before about scammers getting your information. What are some of the things that scammers can do once they have your personal information?

Tucker: Once they have it, it's unfortunately, there are still a lot of things that we lose data that can get you into other accounts. So the last four of your social security number maybe is something that somebody would have as an authenticator, or your date of birth, or your, you know, maiden name, right? So all of these things that we lose are typically something that helps us get into other systems.

Dave: You came up with a list of five ways that fraudsters can attack your business. The first one is just an account takeover. So what does that mean?

1. Account Takeover
2. Check Fraud
3. Mule Accounts
4. Compromised Cards
5. Security Breaches

Tucker: So what it means is they can get into our business accounts. So if you are a commercial client, or you are a treasury client, those have significantly more money in the accounts, other than a consumer account, right? And so for us, they may be able to find ways on the dark web to get credentials for those and then log in. But some of the things we've been finding recently have been spoofing the customers. And spoofing the customers means that it looks like it's coming from a Bok phone number, and they believe it's a Bok person getting their credentials. Yeah, so that's it's it's really, really hard to tell whether or not who's on the other side of the line.

Dave: If you're a Bok customer, if you get that call, what should you do? Somebody saying, Hey, give me your info. This is a random person from BOK.

Tucker: First of all, you tell them to hang up, right? Hang up. Call the number on the back of your card. That's going to be the easiest way to do it, because if you call that number back, it may be going to the actual threat actor.

Dave: Okay, another thing I thought was interesting that I just I didn't know about the mule. Tell us about this mule account.

Tucker: The mule accounts are really where it's kind of a washing and laundering of funds. And what will happen is they will put in certain types of accounts. You may see, all of a sudden, you have a large amount of money in there, and they keep it there because it's if they're hiding it from the Fed, they're hiding from the police departments, and so on. And so they're really trying to just hold it there for a little bit and then send it on down the road. And so that's what we call those mule accounts.

Dave: I was going to say, what should you do if you have an account and all of a sudden you have six figures in there? You have no idea where it came from. What should you do?

Tucker: One, don't spend it. Second of all, call the bank immediately, because we, most banks, are going to have scenarios where they can follow the trace of where this is going to go and get law enforcement involved.

Dave: I think some folks at home, maybe, you know, hey, I'm not a client, or, you know, I don't have a white-collar office job. So this doesn't apply to me. People can get your identity no matter who you are, retiree, someone out there working in construction, blue collar, whatever.

Tucker: It's really sad because we see these, you know, mainly elderly people sometimes, and romance scams and so on. And it's really sad to see how these threat actors take advantage of those individuals. So they're it's not because of their job that they're getting hit, but it's because maybe the threat actors think they have more money because they are older.

Dave: So overall, the theme I'm kind of seeing here, Paul, if someone contacts you asking you for personal information, social security number, bank account number, what should we do?

Tucker: You should not give it to them as soon as you give them that information, within minutes, they can drain an account.