SERVING ALL OF KLICKITAT COUNTY
Goldendale, Washington
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5, 2022
Vol. 143 No. 1
$1.00
LOU MARZELES
FULL-BLAST WINTER: It’s a quiet blanket covering miles upon miles, without a single snowflake like any other in its seemingly endless white shroud. Snow is back in all its glory and inconvenience. This is off Highway 97 on New Year’s Day.
Local businesses lose six figures in bank wire fraud
Dryside Property and Honky Tonk Bar and Restaurant taken for $106,000
LOU MARZELES
LOU MARZELES
VICTIMS OF BANK FRAUD: Mike and Jennifer Kallio discovered they had lost $106,000 from Umpqua Bank. They followed their trail of loss—financial and emotional—from the local branch to the FBI, with the bank telling them the responsibility for the loss is theirs.
LOU MARZELES EDITOR For Jennifer and Mike Kallio, it’s hard to say which was the greater shock: being defrauded of $106,000 from their account at Umpqua Bank, or what they call the uncaring stonewalling they’ve experienced at every level of the bank since then. Jennifer Kallio owns Dryside Property Realty. Together, Mike and Jennifer own the new Honky Tonk Bar and Restaurant. Both businesses are here in Goldendale. In November a hacker got into their online banking account. The Kallios say the hacker used a “foreign” IP address, recorded at first entry, and that the address is shown in a report they obtained. (An IP address is the unique numeric identifier of a specific computer.) Once in, according to the Kallios, the hacker “mimicked” the Kallios’ real IP address to make it look as if new transactions were coming from them. Then the hacker moved funds from different accounts of the Kallios into a single one, in order to amass a larger sum of money. Then, in two transactions on November 4 and 5, the funds in that larger account were whisked away to an account at JP Morgan Chase in Detroit. Umpqua Bank says the process the Kallios describe is not what happened. The bank states there was no “foreign” IP address used to access their account and that no mimicking of their actual IP address occurred. They say the wire transfers were sent because the Kallios, based on established security protocols, authorized it from their own IP address—something that could happen only because the hacker apparently had access to the Kallios’ computer. “The Kallios are ultimately responsible for their own computer
security,” a bank spokesman said. “The attempted access from [a different] IP address… was in fact flagged for review by our system, and access was denied, as it should have been. The subsequent movement of funds from the Kallios’ account occurred from [the Kallios’] IP address, which indicates an intrusion of the Kallios’ system, not Umpqua’s.” However it happened, though they didn’t state it this bluntly, Umpqua Bank essentially says the Kallios will never see that money again. The bank’s position is that it cannot take responsibility for security breaches on customers’ computers. The discovery “On Tuesday, November 9, I was going through the drive-through at Umpqua to make a deposit,” Jennifer recalls. “And when I get handed the receipt with my balance on it, there’s virtually no money in my account. At the time I think it’s odd, but there’s several cars behind me in line. I don’t want to hold up the line; I pull forward and I think, well, it must have been deposited accidentally in one of our other accounts, but when I go to leave the bank—nope, it is my Dryside Property account. So I think, what in the hell? I beat feet home, get on my laptop, and sure enough, I have zero money in my account.” The horror story was just beginning. “I discover that on November 4 they’ve sent a wire out of my Dryside Property account to the tune of $65,000 that I did not authorize.” Jennifer saw in her online banking that another outside access to her account had been made on November 5. “I never got an email notification, never got an account notice, no text message, nothing. I start looking at our online banking to discover, not only did they send the large wire of $65,000 out of my Dryside account, they moved money from our three other checking accounts. They moved all the money over from those accounts into my Dryside Property account.” That same day, November 5, the
See Fraud page A8
BI-POLAR PLUNGE: First it was, “Man, it’s cold!” Then it was, “Let’s hit the water!” Lori Anderson, left with staff, from Parks & Rec led a hardy band of people more strolling into the water than dashing Saturday morning, January 1. Anderson said this was the coldest Polar Plunge in Parks & Rec history, with a surface temperature of 14 degrees. The water was 36.
Last year
SENTINEL FRONT PAGE, JANUARY 6, 2021
THE PLUNGE PLUNGED LAST YEAR: New Year’s Day 2021—wow, look at all that snow! Oh, wait... The day was very different, and we were all settling down for a miserable stretch of don’t-dare-go-out, welcome-to-the-pandemic blues. What a change in a year, even though Covid is still a nuisance.