As Huntsville continues its rapid growth, financial and cybersecurity experts say that same momentum is drawing increased attention from fraudsters.
Regions Bank hosted a fraud prevention seminar last week at the The Westin Huntsville, bringing together clients, business leaders and community members for a discussion on emerging threats and how to stop them.
The event featured a fireside chat led by Jeff Taylor, head of fraud forensics at Regions, alongside retired FBI agent and cybercrime expert Scott Augenbaum.
Taylor said the primary goal of the seminar was to help people better understand how fraud happens and how to respond in real time.
“I think like of the things that I want people to take away from these kind of events is understanding the fraud attack vectors and the way those vectors affect their businesses, their organizations and their families,” Taylor said.
He emphasized a simple but critical step when faced with suspicious financial requests.
“The main thing I always try to communicate is if you’re a victim or you receive a request to make a change to a payment or create a payment, stop your process. Pick up the phone and call the requester at a number that you know. Don’t call the number in the e-mail or in the text message, but call them at a number that you know and confirm that that request is legitimate.”
Taylor said education is at the core of Regions’ fraud prevention efforts.
“We’re we are serious about education awareness. It’s so important to us, the partnerships that we’ve developed with our marketing and communications team that help us to spread the message using every possible medium that we have at our disposal to be able to help people become more aware,” he said. “Because the, the more educated and aware our clients are about these different attack vectors, the greater the likelihood that they’re going to recognize those red flags and pause and, and put stop, call and confirm in place.”
He added that Huntsville’s rapid expansion makes awareness efforts even more important.
“There’s so much growth here when you can hear the heavy equipment moving dirt outside of this building right now. It’s so important that we have those kinds of of awareness programs and educational programs so that as as growth occurs, fraudsters want to take advantage of that,” Taylor said. “They want to take advantage of these situations… anything they think they can do to be able to, to penetrate a defense in some fashion.”
Augenbaum echoed those concerns, noting that most cybercrime is preventable with basic awareness.
“It’s so important that you need to realize that almost 90% of cybercrime could easily be prevented if you just knew a couple of key pieces of information I’m going to share with you,” he said.
He pointed to social engineering as the most common tactic used by criminals.
“The number one tool in the cyber criminals tool belt is social engineering… tricking you into doing something you normally wouldn’t do,” Augenbaum said. “So you’re either going to get an e-mail, a text message, a telephone call, maybe even a social media message telling you to act.”
Those messages often rely on urgency or authority to pressure victims into quick decisions, he said.
“They have emotional triggers like urgency, authority, trust. So if you ever get one of these messages from your credit card, stop, pause and verify.”
Augenbaum also urged attendees to take additional preventative steps, including enabling two-factor authentication and freezing credit.
“Also, make sure that you have two factor authentication on your e-mail, on your cell phone account, on your iCloud account… and lastly, make sure you freeze your credit. This way the bad guys can’t use your credit account to open up other things,” he said. “If people would just do those simple steps, it would prevent a lot of cybercrime.”
The seminar is part of Regions’ broader FraudEDU initiative, aimed at equipping individuals and businesses with the tools to recognize and prevent fraud before it happens.
