Are you using personal finance apps to help manage your money like Dave.com, RobinHood.com, or CashApp? These apps increase the risk of having your financial information breached.
Always use extreme care when using third party apps. The more services you sign up for and the more devices you use provides criminals additional opportunities to steal your information for their personal gain!
Some services link directly to your account, allowing them to monitor your spending or pay bills online. Other services collect personal financial information in real-time, consolidating data from multiple accounts like credit cards, loans, savings, checking, and retirement, in one place. For these services to work, you must freely give them your digital banking login credentials. These services then automatically log in to your digital banking accounts to pull account information and conduct transactions and do so without warning or regard for the systems they are accessing!
Protect your personal information! If you are leveraging any of these tools, here are some important steps you can take:
1. Examine the terms of service for apps you are using.
Review the app’s data retention policies and determine whether the app resells your information.
2. Find out what security features the app offers to ensure your personal information remains safe.
Look for things like two-factor authentication.
3. Always confirm the validity of the app.
Don’t provide your account numbers or any personal or financial information on the phone or online unless you initiate the conversation and you know the organization.
4. Change your passwords and security settings often and use a highly secure password for your financial accounts.
- Secure passwords often contain letters, numbers, and special characters.
- Avoid using the same username and password on multiple sites.
- Guard your pins and passwords. Don’t store them on your phone or write them down in a location where others might be able to access them.
5. Change your credit union and other account passwords if you want to remove an app’s access to your accounts.
Contact SCU right away if you feel your information has been compromised!