Email Fraud Is on the Rise

April 20, 2021

There have been several large scale vulnerabilities discovered worldwide recently that have resulted in, among other things, many email accounts being compromised. As a result, financial institutions across the country, including Kish, have been seeing an increase in the number of fraud attempts coming from legitimate email accounts.

Fraudsters use the hacked email account (or an email address that looks very similar to the legitimate email address) to send emails to financial institutions with requests for wire transfers, adding authorized signers to accounts, adding users to digital banking accounts, etc.

What Kish Is Doing

To protect our customers, we will begin verifying any email requests sent to Kish by calling the phone number associated with the customer’s account.

What You Can Do

Please continue to:

• Make sure your contact information is up to date so that Kish can reach you by phone, if needed.
• Use strong, unique passwords for your email accounts and change them if you suspect they may be compromised.
• Monitor your accounts regularly for fraudulent transactions.
• Set up alerts in Kish Digital Banking to be notified when there is activity on your accounts or cards (click here to learn how).

If you own or operate a business:

• Work with your IT team to ensure your email servers are up to date—critical patches were released by Microsoft as recently as 4/13/21

Additional resources and tips about how to protect yourself can be found on our Security Center.