Good morning,

While you may have come across this - we're seeing another new scam here. The scammers are informing the customers to tell the bank they need cash for 'remodeling' purposes - and that isn't the truth. One customer was going to send to her fiance in Indonesia.

Yes - we do ask the reason for the cash, but if the customer doesn't want to tell us the transaction is still processed.

Just an FYI.

WOW! Thank you for the heads up. They're getting smarter, unfortunately. Like you we do ask the reason for the cash withdrawal however it's up to the customer to tell us the truth or not.

Funny you mention that! We just recently had a customer tell us he was "remodeling" his house as well to the tune of $30,000 and the check was made out to an individual. Mind you this customer was involved in a romance scam about two years ago and lost close to $100,000. I think he's still in denial that it's a scam.

Recently had a customer fall pray to a scam involving ebay and customers computer. Customer gave control of his computer to unknown person so errors on ebay account could be corrected, computer was logged into internet banking. Scammed out of $8,000 cash which was mailed to PO Box in California. Then scammers would transfer money between customers accounts claiming they had given customer money, customer could see deposits but failed to understand it was transfer between accounts not new money. We put a stop to it, period; customer was very stressed without spouse whom was in hospital with Covid and passed recently.

We had a customer trying to send a $6000 wire to California to an indvidual that she claimed was married to her cousin. When asking to contact her cousin to confirm this was legit, she refused. She received the funds for the wire through another bank by taking out a loan - this was in August. She came in just last week and cashed a check for $6,000 - when the teller inquired what the funds were for the customer stated that she was remodeling. After reading this article, we feel like she is still involved in the scam. Thanks for the heads up!

Maybe because we are a smaller bank this is easier for us but we have gotten super critical when it comes to wires. If we don't feel comfortable we don't send the wire. It seems like we are constantly battling our customers over them NOT getting scammed. We have actually permanently banned a couple of customers from sending wires. It's kind of sad really because a lot of the people falling victim are elderly.

Another reason I love the fact that our automated wire system has real time integration with our automated AML system.

PQ, what automated wire system do you use?

WITS, it's great! Literally retail staff enter a wire, customer even hasn't signed it yet and if Verafin think's it's suspicious, we get an immediate alert. Crazy how fast it all is.