No One is Immune

I know what you’re thinking, this is going to be another discussion on wearing a mask during Covid-19. Wrong. When I say no one is immune, I’m talking about check fraud. There are a couple of things to start out with. One, no one writes checks anymore. Two, there are criminals out there every day trying to separate you from your money. Let me tell you my story and how it could have been prevented.

A couple of weeks ago I was looking at my checking account and noticed a $600 dollar check which was cashed. I didn’t remember having a $600 obligation, so I pulled up the check image online. The payee name on the check was no one I knew. I thought, That’s weird. Who is this? The check had my wife’s signature. At noon I drove home and got the checkbook to see the check.

The actual check was made out to my niece's’ daughter for a high school graduation gift of $25 dollars. In the check memo line, it said, “Congrats! We love you.” I knew I had a problem.

Here is an image of some of the original check copy.

Someone had stolen the check (most likely from the recipient’s mailbox) and washed it so they could change the name and amount. Here are some images of the washed check. I’ve included an image of a portion of my wife’s signature. It appears that the check washing obscured her signature, so they had to retrace her signature. I removed our account information, address, and a portion of her signature as a precaution.

I felt sick to my stomach. Now someone had both our names and our bank account number along with the routing number.

I hurried down to the bank and opened a new account and transferred all the funds from the compromised account into the new account. However, that was only the beginning of my problems. Because I had several auto payments attached to the compromised account, and had set the auto pays up years ago, I had to reconstruct many of the processes. It took about three weeks to make sure everything was properly accounted for. My sweet niece felt horrible and put me in touch with an investigator at the United States Postal Inspection Department. I was able to send them the images and they are following up on the case.

Overall, it was just a hassle. But it leaves you feeling violated in some way. I was left with the thought, what could I have done differently to prevent this?

The answer is, not a lot. However, there are a couple of things, I, or we should have done.

1. When we wrote the check, we should have used an un-washable ink pen such as a Uni-ball 207 gel pen. We used to have a number of them around the house, but we forgot to use them in this case. One of the downsides un-washable ink is that it can be messy and take a few minutes to drive.

2. Use a locking mailbox, especially if you have a group box, where multiple mailboxes are together. In our neighborhood, we have four mailboxes together. After seeing someone driving by slowly checking mailboxes, the four of us chipped in and got a locking mailbox set.

3. Don’t write checks. I know its impersonal, but maybe better to Venmo or PayPal monies.

I’m a fraud investigator and was still hit. Let this be a cautionary tale, protect yourself and stay safe out there.