Patelco Credit Union Experienced A Breach
Like many Patelco Credit Union Members I woke up early Saturday morning, June 29, 2024, to find I couldn’t log in to my Patelco accounts.
After a few hours had passed I was still not able to log into my account nor could my husband log into his Patelco Credit Union accounts.
He has been a member for over 30 years and has never been locked out of his account for more than an hour or two, and that was simply for standard site maintenance.
We knew something must be wrong and had an uneasy feeling. As the day went on and there was no news coverage about Members being locked out of their account and no real movement on social media, I happened to check the Patelco Credit Union X/Twitter profile, @PatelcoPays, and found this:
A torrent of users, also Members of Patelco Credit Union, expressed their dismay, anxiety and utter shock at the lack of transparency from Patelco’s Board or even their President. The morning turned to afternoon then the afternoon to evening and by the next day, Sunday, June 30, 2024 many Members, if not all, were in full panic mode.
Patelco Credit Union is one of the largest credit unions in the United States and recently boasted it had reached a milestone in memberships:
On Sunday, my husband and I went to our share-branch in the Gulf of Mexico and found we were able to withdraw some cash from our checking and savings accounts, but our life savings, which lives in our Patelco Credit Union Money Market accounts, was an unknown.
Most Patelco Members live in the Bay Area and from what I could see of the Twitter feeds, they are smart, tech savvy and industrious.
I have not received permission to share their tweets and some have even asked me to keep them anonymous, so I won’t share their extraordinarily helpful tweets here, but I will share the conversation we had when I decided to host my very first Twitter Spaces, which I’ve uploaded onto a Soundcloud file.
Please listen to this hour-long discussion with some of the most resilient and helpful people I’ve ever had the pleasure of stumbling across in the face of a terrible situation. In this discussion we were reminded that as Patelco Members we are not just customers at a bank, we are Members who invest into the Credit Union and therefore have more leverage to get things moving in our favor. Please listen:
My husband and I are attempting to fight back despondency and fear over the possibility that our small life savings may be gone. During our Twitter Spaces event, @PatelcoPays finally gave an update on their page and a similar email was sent to Patelco Members personally from the President:
We do hope that each and every Member can somehow recover from this and that Patelco will be able to reverse any damage, provide more transparency and shore up further safety features to protect its valuable Members.
