Coastal Heritage Bank was made aware of a trend in the online banking industry which has resulted in an increase of fraudulent payments in the Person to Person (P2P) network space at other banks. We have been informed this is common in Zelle, a fund transfer service currently offered to our consumer customers. In the vast majority of reported cases, online banking platforms are sending one-time passcodes to the customer, and through a series of social engineering and pre-texting initiatives, fraudsters are successfully obtaining the one-time code needed to complete the payment.

Many times, the fraudster is also spoofing the financial institution’s phone number or pretending to call from the bank’s contact center. Fraudsters either have online banking credentials already through other means (social engineering, other site breach using same credentials, malware, etc.) or are using the forgot password functionality and are convincing the user the process is done to help “validate themselves.” The calls are often regarding a fictitious transaction and the fraudster calls from the banks phone number pretending to be the banks fraud department.

Coastal Heritage Bank would like to remind you that we will NEVER call or text you asking for one-time codes. One-time codes will only be presented to you for activity that YOU have initiated.

We would like to take this time to encourage separate passwords for online banking and personal email. For best protection, have separate, randomly generated passwords for all of your sites. Fraudsters will commonly obtain credentials from other online portals or black-market sales which originated from other sites and then try those same credentials in online banking.

If ever in doubt regarding a phone call, it’s best to hang up and call us back at a phone number posted on our website, 800-695-1300.