Make It Impossible to Miss Fraud Alert Emails From Your Bank
This was bound to happen someday: Someone finally tampered with my new credit card and I got a warning that they were trying to make a physical purchase at a local gas station. And here’s a quick explanation of why I almost missed this important notice (so you don’t have this problem in the future!).
Background to my email filtering setup
I get a decent amount of finance-related emails: credit score to be paid, you made a transfer, you have a new offer, etc. In fact, 99% of the time, I don’t need to act on any information I receive from my bank or credit card providers.
This might sound confusing from an account security standpoint because most people are likely to want to know when someone else tries to access their money. Listen to me. I lock all my bank accounts and credit cards with unique passwords that cannot be guessed with double security with two-factor authentication, which requires physical access to my phone to confirm new logins. I’ve never had a problem with someone being able to log into my account, which they shouldn’t have, in all the time I’ve had this setup. (Knock on wood.)
I also assumed, perhaps foolishly, that my credit card issuer would notify me with a hard-to-miss phone call or text message if they suspected one of my cards was being scammed. I remember that this was the case when old credit cards were compromised. And since my current card is one of those top tier cards , I figured I was ready.
Instead, I received a scam letter – one letter. And since he and his colleagues were filtered to a Gmail tag that I don’t check often, I’m grateful I chose that day to delete unread messages with my Finance tag. I saw the email, confirmed that the write-off was fictitious, and initiated a “can I have a new card, please” mechanism with the anti-fraud department of my issuer.
It is, of course, possible that in the end I would have received this phone call or text message if I had not noticed this letter. By then, who knows what other accusations I might have had to find and refute – it’s a slightly annoying process. However, there is a way to fix this: make the scam alerts too nasty to ignore in your email.
Set up email filters to avoid missing fraud alerts
If you are not using any filters in your email, now is a great time to start. I don’t know which bank you are using, so I can’t say the details, but here are some ideas:
- Filter all messages from your bank to a special folder so they don’t get lost in your inbox (which may require you to enter *@yourbankname.com as a filter for “From” if you can’t just enter a domain name).
- Filter out all messages from your bank’s dedicated fraud alert service, which can have a dedicated email address, subdomain, or simply have the full service name in the body of the email.
- Filter out a set of specific phrases, such as your bank name and the word “fraud”.
- Filter out the last four digits of your credit card that may appear in any important messages from your bank.
You can also look at old emails from your bank to see if you have any scam notices that you have already encountered. If so, look for any other characteristics that might differentiate this email from others sent by your bank and filter based on those characteristics.
Be specific when setting up your filters because you don’t want to accidentally drag and drop phishing emails that try to impersonate your bank. This shouldn’t be a problem if your email service is good at handling spam, but if in doubt, I would probably try to install a combination filter for emails with the exact domain of your bank that contain the word “scam” rather than just a filter. which catches subject lines with “your bank name” and “scam”.
You can also set additional filters to flag, flag, or otherwise highlight certain fraudulent messages if you are already filtering your financial emails in some way. This is my situation. In Gmail, I created a custom signature under my Finance label and created this setting (based on a custom subdomain for my credit card fraud alerts):
Then I set the shortcut to a nice bright red color, so it’s pretty hard to miss in the inbox:
If I were using Outlook, I would probably use the advanced options in the Rules feature of the application to set up my flags like this:
How you decide to set up your own email filters is up to you, but I recommend using some sort of separate folder or shortcut, and whatever tagging or tagging system your service allows, to give yourself everything the eye needs. Most likely, you will rarely see such messages, so it is not that important that they are annoying. And when you really need to be with them something to take, you are sure to notice them. Believe me.