When something looks off, it usually is off. This past week, on a very normal Tuesday night at the Smidt house, text messages arrived to both of the Blackberry phones in our house with the following text: “Federal Credit Union Alert: Your Visa Card has been placed on hold.”

Now the knee jerk response to the initial reading is, “Yikes, I need to call my financial institution immediately, what was that number again?” But upon a second read through, I started seeing the red flags waving. No. 1, our financial institution never sends us text messages. If there is a problem they call us on the house phone. No. 2, the name of the credit union in the message is not the correct name of our financial institution. No. 3, having been long term members of said institution we are familiar with the phone numbers we need to call and this number is not similar or recognizable. So we marched upstairs to the home office and grabbed the copy of our last bank statement. Calling the number for customer service on that statement and talking to a representative proved that this was in fact a major phishing expedition that could easily lead to identity theft. The customer service department had been receiving a very high number of calls regarding this message.

Two years ago I was the victim of identity theft. While I happily knew that my debit card was tucked securely away in my purse, the number for the card was in the New York area slumming it up with a matching dummy license and having a really good time to the tune of $800 before the thieves got shut down. Because we were on it so quickly, damage was kept to a minimum and the money was returned to our account within 5 days. That’s the good news. The bad news is that having to cancel everything in your wallet is time consuming and tedious, plus bills on automatic withdrawal. A significant amount of personal time also needs to be invested over the next year, monitoring credit scores through various services to make sure nothing else fraudulent is occurring.

If you get an unusual message from your financial institution, take a moment and think. Re-read everything and analyze the situation. If it does not meet the smell test, do not respond. Go directly to your branch or find something like a statement or an e-mail that you already know comes directly from your financial institution and call the customer service department number listed right away. Do not wait. The time you take now will save you countless dollars and hours of your time in the future. Continue to be very, very careful.