Cyberhackers siphoned $985,000 out of a Village of Franklin bank account in November 2025, and nearly a year later, the small Oakland County community still has not recovered all of the money. The FBI and local police are now investigating the theft, which amounted to just over 12% of the village's annual budget.
Franklin Village President David Goldberg first disclosed the cyberhacking incident at the village's December 8, 2025, council meeting, according to MLive.com. Village officials say they noticed the withdrawals quickly and alerted authorities, and Goldberg has said the FBI became involved within five minutes of the money being taken. Officials could not share details of the open police investigation, and Franklin-Bingham Police Chief Curt Lawson has not disclosed how the hackers gained access to the account.
The Village of Franklin is a 2.66-square-mile enclave of estate-style homes roughly 20 miles northwest of downtown Detroit, home to about 3,139 residents as of the 2020 Census and known for hosting Michigan's first designated historic district, established in 1969, according to Wikipedia. For a community that small, a $985,000 loss lands hard: the village received $8.59 million in revenue in 2025 and spent just over $8 million that year, meaning the missing funds represent a significant chunk of its operating capacity.
Residents Demand Answers as Frustration Builds
At the August 10 village council meeting, residents pushed officials for more information, and some called for certain council members to resign, per the same MLive report. Resident Ron Reame said the village needs answers about the theft. The council discussed using an app to send messages directly to residents, an apparent response to the frustration over limited public information about the case.
Rachel Loughrin, a village manager and one of two official check signers along with Chief Lawson, promised a written plan laying out the timeline for financial reforms. Council members also requested that the village designate alternative signers in case Loughrin and Lawson are simultaneously unavailable, since the village charter requires two signatures on financial transactions.
New Controls and a Bank Switch
The village council approved new and stricter internal controls at the same meeting, formalizing a clear separation of staff duties across departments so that, for example, the employee who enters an invoice cannot also be the one who approves it. The Village of Franklin is also switching banks, moving its accounts from First Merchants Bank to Huntington Bank, and plans to close the First Merchants accounts once all outstanding bills are paid. First Merchants Bank did not respond to MLive's request for comment.
That banking transition has hit its own snags. During the August 10 meeting, trustees noted administrative delays in signing Huntington Bank's DocuSign paperwork between July 2 and August 7, and expressed concern the delay could affect recovery claims, according to Citizen Portal. The village has hired an attorney and is pursuing legal action against both its insurance provider and First Merchants Bank as it tries to recover the lost funds.
A Regional Pattern of Municipal Cyber Theft
Franklin Village is not the first Oakland County government to be targeted this way. In November 2024, neighboring White Lake Township lost $29 million when hackers compromised a municipal official's email account and sent fraudulent wiring instructions during an infrastructure bond closing, according to Bond Buyer. That township recovered $21.3 million of the stolen bond proceeds, but the bond underwriter then demanded $6 million to $7 million in damages, halting construction on a planned $45 million civic center complex, as reported by WHMI.
Smaller Michigan municipalities have faced similar attacks before, including the City of the Village of Clarkston, which was hit by ransomware in 2018, according to Oakland County Times. When Goldberg disclosed Franklin's incident in December 2025, he clarified that no personal resident data was compromised, framing it strictly as an external financial phishing scam targeting a municipal account, per the same outlet.
The scale of the threat facing local governments has been growing nationally. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report, released in April, found that total cybercrime losses reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center exceeded $20.8 billion across more than 1 million complaints. Business email compromise schemes specifically accounted for 24,768 complaints and more than $3.04 billion in losses, or roughly 19% of all reported cybercrime financial losses, according to Red Sift. The FBI's Recovery Asset Team has said its Financial Fraud Kill Chain process successfully freezes funds in roughly 73% of domestic business email compromise cases when victims notify banks and law enforcement quickly.
Oakland County IT leadership announced plans in August to migrate all county web and email services to official .gov domains by October, a move intended to make official government emails harder to spoof and impersonate. For now, Franklin Village continues working with police and the FBI as it attempts to recover the remainder of the $985,000 and rebuild resident trust. The village's next council meeting is scheduled for September 14 at 6 p.m. at Village Hall, 32325 Franklin Road.
