The newspapers have received at least three notices of scams being conducted in the Westman area. Please be on guard. If you get a phone call that is suspicious, hang up, you are under no obligations to answer questions, especially from a company or supplier aren’t involved with. That said, we have been notified that some scammers are claiming to be from Sunrise Credit Union. Sunrise released the following statement late last week.

    “We are reaching out to inform you of a current phone scam that has been reported by several Sunrise Credit Union members.
Individuals posing as Sunrise Credit Union employees — in some instances identifying themselves as “Risk Managers” from our Fraud Department — have been contacting members by phone. These calls may appear to originate from our legitimate toll-free number (1-888-289-3097), which is being spoofed by the fraudsters.
During these calls, the individuals attempt to obtain sensitive banking information, including online banking login credentials. Please be advised that Sunrise Credit Union will never contact you to request account details or login information over the phone.
If you receive a suspicious call of this nature, we recommend that you hang up immediately and contact your local branch using their direct phone number.
As always, we encourage you to remain vigilant and never share personal or financial information over the phone.
Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

    We also received some disturbing news from Cybernews, a company that monitors internet security breaches as follows.

    “Cybernews researchers have uncovered a massive data exposure affecting more than 250 million identity records across seven countries, including Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Mexico, South Africa, and Canada.

    Three misconfigured servers — hosted on IP addresses in Brazil and the UAE — contained detailed personal information, resembling government-level identity profiles, now confirmed to have been publicly accessible.

    “It's likely that these databases were operated by a single party, due to the similar data structures, but there’s no attribution as to who controlled the data, or any hard links proving that these instances belonged to the same party,” said the research team.