Fraud Protection

Identity theft is a crime whereby criminals attempt to obtain legitimate customer information in order to open accounts under the customer’s name or withdraw funds from existing customer accounts. Criminals have become very sophisticated in this regard, often precisely copying the web site appearance and content of legitimate firms and government agencies. Fraudulent e-mails, also known as “phishing” or “spoofing”, are sent by criminals pretending to be a financial services firm or government entity. These e-mails aim to convince the recipient to enter personal information such as social security numbers, date of birth, etc. in order to allow the criminal to impersonate the legitimate customer.

In order to fight identity theft, American Principle Bank will never e-mail you requesting confidential information over the Internet. We advise our customers to never respond to non-requested e-mails, pop-ups, or links that request the input of any type of personal information. In addition, we utilize various security software, procedures, and devices to authenticate our customers, including tokens which generate a random number password every thirty seconds.

We may be calling you.

To protect your accounts, we monitor your check card transactions for potentially fraudulent activity which may include a sudden change in locale, a sudden string of costly purchases, or any other pattern frequently associated with fraudulent activity.

If we suspect fraudulent check card use, we will call you to validate the legitimacy of the transactions. Your participation in responding to our call is critical to help prevent potential risk and avoid restrictions we may place on the use of your card.

Our call, which may be automated, will ask you to verify recent transaction activity on your card. If the call is automated, you will be asked to respond via your touchtone keypad. You’ll also be provided with a toll-free number to call should you have any questions.

We also fight identity theft by:

• Taking a digital photo of our customers, which can be referenced during any in-branch transaction.

• Requiring thumbprints on all checks cashed for non-customers.

• Advising our customers to never print their social security number or driver license number on their checks.

• Making positive pay service available to our customers, whereby checks presented to us for payment are compared against the inventory of checks the customer has informed us have been issued.

We make a credit bureau monitoring service available to our customers. This service e-mails you an alert of credit bureau activity, facilitating your taking quick action should a criminal attempt to open an account in your name or take other actions associated with identity theft. We provide this service at attractive pricing as part of our relationship package. Please contact any bank officer if you would like additional information regarding this service, or call our switchboard at 805.547.2800.

For additional information regarding identity theft, click on the following link to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation web site:

http://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/news/cnsum00/idthft.html

Our Privacy Notice may be accessed under the “Disclosures” page of this web site.