Identity Theft is the fastest-growing white-collar crime in the United States, according to the U.S. Attorney General. In identity theft, a thief assumes your identity by using personal information, such as your name, Social Security number, date of birth, or account login information to commit fraud.

As regards your accounts at Christian Brothers Services, an imposter could access and manipulate your account to add false information, delete records or change key information causing errors and discrepancies in records.

The latest scam undertaken by computer criminals is called "phishing."
Here's how it works: You receive an e-mail that appears to be from Christian Brothers Services. The e-mail might even be designed to look like the our website. The e-mail directs you to enter account access information such as your account number, username or password on what appears to be our authentic log-in page. But when you enter your information, it is actually routed to criminals.

What can you do to make sure you're not a victim of this scam or others?
First, you should not reply to unsolicited e-mails from companies/people that you do not recognize requesting access information. If you have questions about your account, you should call the company, or start with a clean Web browser and type in www.cbservices.org.

Christian Brothers Services will never send out an e-mail that requires you to visit a separate web-page to verify your log-in information or submit personal information. Access to all accounts is done in one place only: Using the Administrators’ login box on the home page of our website, www.cbservices.org.

If you receive this type of e-mail with reference to our company, please contact our Chief Privacy Officer at 800-807-0100.

If the e-mail had references to another company, you should contact that company directly.

Other things you can do to protect yourself:
1. Monitor your account activity.
At least once a quarter, review the on-line listing of Transactions in the Account Info section of your Member’s Only website section. All of the on-line transactions that you have made will be listed here.

• Check your monthly statements for accuracy.
• Protect your account information. Do not give out your username and password to anyone who is not authorized to see your account information. We will issue a separate userid and password for every one of your staff members that require access to your information.
• Before discarding e-mails and other paperwork containing access information, make sure to shred those documents.

Once your session is secure with an encrypted connection, you should see a key or lock symbol on your browser.

• Ensure your computer is equipped with anti-virus protection and firewalls.
• Install security patches when issued by the software vendor.
• Shut off/disconnect your computer from the Internet when not in use.
• Enable Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP) on wireless devices in use.
• When using a public computer, be sure that user IDs and passwords are not saved on that computer.

As our customer, you can feel confident that your information is protected.
We use a variety of methods to help secure your personal information - account data, user ID,
password, applications and other confidential information:

• When you log in to your account on the Internet, your password is encrypted, replacing the characters you type with asterisks so that no one can see your password. Any screen that displays or requests information about your account is encrypted. Christian Brothers Services uses the latest and most secure encryption to protect the transmission of account information. For more information on our security, please click here. (Existing website page)
• We store your user ID and password in our protected database that can be reviewed only by those with clearance to the data.
• We have an internal policy that outlines the responsibility that our employees have to protect customer information, and we have Service Agreements in place with our service providers to also protect customer information.
• We also have procedures in place so that when a customer contacts their customer service
  or account representative, we can help verify that they are who they say they are.

More information
For more tips on preventing "phishing" scams and identity theft, see:

FTC, "How Not to Get Hooked by the Phishing Scam", July 2003

FTC, "ID Theft: When Bad Things Happen to Your Good Name", September 2002