One of the institutions affected is the Community Shores Bank, which last week asked about 550 of its members to destroy their debit and credit cards after the credit union noticed that several of its cards had been used in fraudulent transactions.

The fraud first began about Nov. 9 and started "rapidly increasing," said Sherri Campbell, vice president of deposit operations at the bank. In many cases, forged cards were used to conduct transactions in amounts that exceeded US$1,000 -- with some transactions reaching $2,000, she said.

"Most of the fraud we have seen is coming out of Georgia, Arizona and California," Campbell said. In some cases, forged cards were used to make purchases from as far away as Spain and France, she said. "We do know that [the perpetrators] are re-creating plastic, because these were all signature-based 'card present' transactions."

Although the bank has reissued cards in the past, it has never seen this level of fraudulent activity before.

Family Financial Credit Union, another Muskegon-based financial institution, has so far replaced nearly 1,000 debit and credit cards as a result of fraud concerns, the credit union's president, Thomas Curtis, said via e-mail today. He refused to provide any other information but confirmed the details of a report in The Muskegon Chronicle that said the bank was canceling the cards as a precautionary measure after some of its members had been victimized by fraud.