Privacy & Security

The Bank of Wisconsin Dells is committed to protecting your financial information and keeping your personal information secure and confidential. We continually review and evaluate our policies and procedures to ensure that your information is protected. As a customer you can help protect your account by monitoring your transactions and by staying informed about potential threats to your privacy and financial security. If you notice suspicious activity on your account or are a victim of a security related event, call a personal banker at 608-253-1111.

IMPORTANT: The Bank of Wisconsin Dells will not ask for non-public information such as account numbers or social security numbers through unsolicited emails or phone calls. If you should receive a suspicious email or phone call, please do not provide any information. Contact bank personnel at 608-253-1111 to inform them of the incident.

• Privacy Policy– Bank of Wisconsin Dells policy regarding the collection and use of your personal information.

Review Account Statements

It is good practice to periodically review credit card, bank and other financial account statements for unauthorized account activity. Immediately report any unauthorized activity to the financial institution in order to limit your liability.

Check Your Credit

The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires each of the nationwide credit reporting companies — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — to provide you with a free copy of your credit report, at your request, once every 12 months.

A credit report includes information on where you live, how you pay your bills, and whether you’ve been sued or have filed for bankruptcy. Nationwide credit reporting companies sell the information in your report to creditors, insurers, employers, and other businesses that use it to evaluate your applications for credit, insurance, employment, or renting a home.

It is important to review your report to make sure the information is accurate, complete, and up-to-date and to guard against identity theft. Go to free credit report for more information.

Phishing, Vishing & Pharming

(Wikipedia definitions)

Phishing
Phishing is the attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and sometimes, indirectly, money) by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.

Communications purporting to be from popular social websites, auction sites, banks, online payment processors or IT administrators are commonly used to lure unsuspecting public. Phishing emails may contain links to websites that are infected with malware. Phishing is typically carried out by email spoofing or instant messaging, and it often directs users to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one. Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques used to deceive users, and exploits the poor usability of current web security technologies.

Phishing is a continual threat that keeps growing. The risk grows even larger in social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace etc. Hackers commonly use these sites to attack persons using these media sites in their workplace, homes, or public in order to take personal and security information that can affect the user and the company (if in a workplace environment) .

Phishing is used to portray trust in the user since you can usually not tell that the site or program being visited/used is not real, and when this occurs is when the hacker has the chance to access the personal information such as passwords, usernames, security codes, and credit card numbers among other things.

Vishing
Vishing or voice phishing is the criminal practice of using social engineering over the telephone system to gain access to private personal and financial information from the public for the purpose of financial reward. Vishing exploits the public’s trust in landline telephone services. Vishing is typically used to steal credit card numbers or other information used in identity theft schemes from individuals.

Vishing is difficult for legal authorities to monitor or trace. To protect themselves, consumers are advised to be highly suspicious when receiving messages directing them to call and provide credit card or bank numbers. When in doubt, calling a company’s telephone number listed on billing statements or other official sources is recommended as opposed to calling numbers received from messages or callers of dubious authenticity.

Pharming
Pharming is a cyber-attack intended to redirect a website’s traffic to another bogus/fraudulent site. Pharming is used to gain information for online identity theft. Antivirus software and spyware removal software cannot protect against pharming.

When entering your IDs and passwords on a website, it is recommended that you take notice of the web address to ensure its accuracy. If you notice something suspicious about a trusted website, report it by telephone to the business.

Protect Your Internet Access Devices

No matter what device you use to access your accounts, it needs to be protected using antivirus software, firewalls and encryption services. Keep all software and browsers up to date. Check for and install all security patches available from the developer of your operating system. Run antivirus against incoming emails and update the virus definitions regularly. Set up a firewall to prevent intruders from gaining access to your device.

In addition to software, you should choose strong passwords which include upper and lower case letters and special characters to protect your accounts. When creating a password do not use personal information, do not use the same password for multiple sites and do not allow passwords to be saved. Also do not trust public computers to access secure accounts as they can be configured to remember passwords.