Protect Yourself from Fraud

Industry wide, there has been an increase in fraud across all payment avenues (Check, ACH and Wire). For your protection, Citizens National Bank (CNB) recommends utilizing strong email passwords and any payment instructions received via e-mail should be confirmed verbally with your contact prior to submitting payments.

Check Fraud:

• White washing or altering checks – When an item has been intercepted from the mail and the payee name has been changed.
• Counterfeit checks – In some cases an item that has been intercepted has been replicated to look like the original, but the amount and payee information has been changed. 

Review checks posting to the account daily to verify check numbers, amounts and payees are accurate to the original check(s) issued.

Inaccurate Endorsements:

• Generally, Corporations and LLCs do not endorse checks with their signature prior to depositing. Smaller businesses may physically endorse checks with the signature of the business owner.

E-mail Compromise:

Most commonly occurs when fraudsters gain access to email control and divert incoming emails or send emails posing to be from the business.  Frequently, the fraudster will request for payment instructions to be changed to an outside account under their control.

If requests are received to make changes to any ACH or wire instructions, verbally review and confirm these changes with your contact, utilizing the phone number you have on file. Do not use any contact information that may have been included in the email in which the change request was received.

CNB offers services to help aid you with your daily review tasks. These services include Positive Pay, Reverse Positive Pay and ACH Positive Pay. In absence of these fraud detection services, you are still responsible for reviewing your posted checks and ACH items in a timely manner, in order to detect any fraudulent items.  For more information about CNB’s fraud detection services, please contact our Treasury Management team or contact your local branch for more details.