.BANK - Effective January 23, 2023
ChoiceOne Bank is transitioning our website and email domains from “choiceone.com” to “choiceone.bank.” This change will provide another layer of enhanced security and verification requirements to reduce the risk of cyber threats and enable the Bank to provide a greater level of digital security.
WHAT IS .BANK?
.BANK is a protected domain, like .gov or .edu, but for verified banks. Replacing other generic top-level domains like .com, which can be purchased by anyone, .BANK enables quick verification that the website or email is authentically from our Bank, so you can interact with confidence when you see .BANK at the end of our email address and website URL.
WHY .BANK?
Our new .BANK domain helps to prevent phishing attacks against our employees, customers, and vendors by providing a visual identification cue for our emails and websites. Going forward, you should authenticate our emails and website(s) simply by looking for the “.BANK” (rather than .com) at the end of our email addresses and at the end of our URL. If it’s not .BANK it’s not us.
HOW IS .BANK MORE SECURE?
All banks using ‘.bank’ are verified and authenticated by fTLD Registry Services, LLC, the ‘.bank’ administrator. This ensures everyone using a ‘.bank’ domain is an eligible organization. Hackers and bad actors cannot get a ‘.bank’ domain to create lookalike domains for phishing and spoofing, as they can in a ‘.com’ and other publicly available domains.
DO I NEED TO DO ANYTHING DIFFERENTLY NOW THAT YOU’RE .BANK?
Our email addresses and website URL now end in .BANK. From now on, before interacting with emails from us, and before you enter your username and password on our website, simply look for the ‘.BANK’ to authenticate the email or website is ours.
Our .com email addresses are forwarding to our new .BANK email addresses, and our .com website redirects to our new .BANK site, but over time you should update your address book and bookmark for our site.
The main takeaway: For security purposes our email addresses and website URL now end in ‘.BANK’ instead of ‘.com’; look for the ‘.BANK’ before interacting with any email or website of ours.
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