Are you using a personal finance app to help manage your money? If you are, you aren’t alone.
Consumers across the country are increasingly turning to apps like Dave.com, RobinHood.com, CashApp, and countless others to monitor their spending. While these apps may provide a platform for viewing and working with multiple accounts, they also increase the risk of having financial information breached. In fact, a recent breach at Waydev affected 7.5M consumers.
If you are leveraging any of these tools, there are some important steps you can take to protect your personal information.
- 1. Examine the terms of service for apps you are using.
• Review the app’s data retention policies and determine whether the app resells your information. - 2. Find out what security features the app offers to ensure your personal information remains safe.
• Look for things like two-factor authentication. - 3. Always confirm the validity of the app.
• Don’t provide your account numbers or any personal or financial information on the phone or online unless you initiate the conversation and you know the organization. - 4. Change your passwords and security settings often and use a highly secure password for your financial accounts.
• Secure passwords often contain letters, numbers, and special characters.
• Avoid using the same username and password on multiple sites.
• Guard your pins and passwords. Don’t store them on your phone or write them down in a location where others might be able to access them. - 5. Change your credit union and other account passwords if you want to remove an app’s access to your accounts.
- 6. Contact us at 888-754- 9980 right away if you feel your information has been compromised!
Always use extreme care when using third party apps. The more services you sign up for and the more devices you use provides criminals additional opportunities to steal your information for their personal gain.
