Duh of the Week: I-R-O-N-Y

by Ron Daly 

Irony. It's the soul of a good joke or a turn of phrase. It's hard to define, but the kind of irony we're talking about today is the kind that comes from expecting one thing and getting another...or maybe the same thing in a different way. 

See, the NCUA posted a fraud alert Tuesday of last week about a letter that had reached a credit union bearing the NCUA logo and bearing the signature of Michael Fryzel (read that fraud alert here). The alert told CUs to be on the lookout for similar letters bundled with a set of compact discs, and told them to disregard said letter and not to put the disks into any of the computers. 

Then, on Friday of last week, this came through (read the fraud alert update here). 

From the release:

As part of an an internal "system penetration" test, a credit union created a facsimile of an NCUA Fraud Alert. This was an unauthorized and improper use of the NCUA logo, and also included a falsified signature of then-Chairman Michael Fryzel. The bogus alert was forwarded to NCUA, prompting the issuance of the August 25 Fraud Alert. The false Fraud Alert appears to be confined to that credit union, and is not wide-spread.

D'oh! 

Turns out, the CU that got "frauded" was "frauding" itself. The false alert set off a real alert. Can you spell "irony"? 

I'm sure that in the future, whichever CU it was will be using some fake agency name and not the NCUA. Good to know, of course, that the NCUA is willing to post alerts and follow up on them (they even have an RSS feed of news, which is handy). Here's hoping our "Duh of the Week" award will be a reminder to all CUs to keep an eye on their fraud drills - and avoid irony.