Brute Force Fraud

Protecting your finances online

Ensuring the safety of your debit and credit cards is increasingly important due to the constant emergence of new methods employed by cyber criminals to access your personal information. Familiarizing yourself with the various types of scams is a crucial measure in safeguarding your sensitive data.

Brute force attacks are a common type of cyber attack, where the bad guys use a trial and error method to guess information. This can be used to hack many types of sensitive information such as passwords and account numbers. In the instance of debit cards, the criminals get access to the BIN numbers, which are the digits of a debit card that are unique to each institution. From there, they use auto-dialers to guess sequences of numbers until they hit on valid debit card numbers.

Once successful, they will typically start with small dollar amounts charged to your debit card. This is to test and see if the transactions go through, before larger amounts are charged.

It’s hard for the consumer to protect against these types of attacks, since they are random in nature. Pennian Bank is diligent with fraud detection and prevention. We work with vendors that help us recognize fraud so we can block it quickly. While our team works hard to help with fraud prevention, there are a few ways that you can also help identify fraud on your debit card.

  • Check your online banking and/or statements – The quicker fraudulent transactions are identified, the quicker they can be blocked. If you don’t recognize transactions on your account, contact our Customer Care Center to report them.
  • Use Card Valet – This is a stand-alone app that can be used to monitor your debit card activity. With Card Valet, you are alerted when transactions are made on your card. You can shut your card off, set parameters on places it’s allowed to be used and more.

Remaining vigilant can help you detect fraud and stop it in its tracks!

Live chat is initializing
Live Chat