How Navy Federal Credit Union Blunted an Unprecedented Fraud Attack

Source: Shutterstock.

Fraud attacks against credit unions and banks have increased substantially, and no one knows that better than Garin Danielian, assistant vice president of fraud analytics at the $151 billion Navy Federal Credit Union in Vienna, Va.

“In the fall of 2020, we were hit with an attack that was unprecedented from our perspective. We had a seven-to-10-day period where we received as many as 2,000 fraudulent applications in an hour,” Danielian said during a Credit Union Fraud RoundTable sponsored by SentiLink last week. “We received, in that week period, an entire year’s worth of fraudulent applications compressed in seven days. As you can imagine, that put tremendous pressure on the detection analysts but also on everyone who was working on investigating cases and the people who then had to clean up 100,000 applications.”