BY MATTHEW STONE

Staff Writer

Central Maine residents are the targets this week of an uptick in automated phone scams.

Since Tuesday, KV Federal Credit Union has received more than a dozen calls from members and others targeted by calls warning that KV Federal Credit Union accounts or credit and debit cards are poised to expire.

An automated voice then asks them to enter their bank account or card numbers.

"I suspect they're going through a phone directory for the central Maine area and working their way through that," said Bill Tozier, a manager and security officer at KV Federal Credit Union, which has offices in Augusta and Oakland.

The bogus phone calls do not single out KV Federal Credit Union. Paul DeRosby, director of security at the Augusta-based Maine State Credit Union, said "several" members called the credit union this week after receiving automated calls from "Maine Credit Union."

"They gave me numbers, and I've traced them back to Texas, a couple different provinces in Canada, Delaware, Florida," DeRosby said.

Scammers can manipulate caller ID systems to reflect phone numbers and company names from virtually anywhere, he said.

Roland Michaud, of Manchester, said he received an automated call Thursday morning asking him to activate his credit card by dialing in the card number. The phone call purported to be from "Federal Credit Union," he said.

"Usually, with a credit union, they don't call you and tell you they're going to activate it over the phone," Michaud said.

Plus, he said, he had activated his newest credit card more than four months ago.

So Michaud called his credit union, cPort Credit Union, to confirm he was, indeed, the target of a scam.

"I know they wouldn't do that over the telephone," he said. "You don't just give your credit card number over the phone."

Most KV Federal Credit Union members targeted in the scam were as skeptical as Michaud, Tozier said.

"Fortunately, I think consumers have become aware of the landscape, how these days you can get a phone call looking for information such as this," he said. "Or they may be looking for personal information by e-mail or U.S. mail."

One KV Federal Credit Union member, Tozier said, initially fell for the scam, "then thought the better of it."

The member called the credit union and officials canceled the compromised card.

"Within a very short period of time," Tozier said, "a charge from Romania attempted to post."

While scammers and spammers have increasingly used e-mail and U.S. mail in recent years to fool consumers, phone scams have become more common of late, said Jon Paradise, governmental and public affairs manager at the Maine Credit Union League.

"In the last three to five months, for some reason, they've gone back to the phone," he said.

In 2007, "phishing scams" that targeted consumers through e-mail and led them to forged financial institution Web sites prevailed, said Lloyd LaFountain, superintendent of the Maine Bureau of Financial Institutions.

"It can be cyclical in nature," he said. "It could be e-mail in another couple months."

While the phony calls of the last few days have not targeted Pittsfield's Sebasticook Valley Federal Credit Union, that bank's vice president of operations, Kelley Carter, said he wouldn't be surprised if it happened in the future.

"There are definitely constant efforts," he said. "They drop in and make a couple hits and then they leave and hit another part of the country."

The most recent spate of false calls to target Sebasticook members, Carter said, lasted just one evening "and they disappeared within hours."

"I don't expect it to stop," he said. "I think they're going to keep doing it until the federal authorities figure out how to stop it."

Matthew Stone -- 623-3811, Ext. 435

mstone@centralmaine.com