A couple of months ago, I wrote a check for about $200 to my pool company for the monthly maintenance. It was a computer-generated check that I mailed in a window envelope, which made it apparent that a check was enclosed. After about ten days, the check had still not cleared. I called the company and they said they had not received it. A couple of days later, the check cleared my bank twice, except the payee and the amount had been altered. Instead of being payable to my pool company for $200, the check was shown to be payable to a company and a person I had never heard of and were for a total of over $14,000.
Under the Uniform Commercial Code, the person that first accepts the forged signature must bear the loss. So, in my case, my bank had to replace the funds in my account and they, in turn, were made whole by the banks that originally accepted the forged checks.
But I still had to close the account and open a new account. That meant I had order to new checks and contact all of my auto payments and deposits. And because some of those do not act immediately, e.g., the Social Security Administration, I had to work with my bank to periodically transfer funds out of the closed account. In other words, it has been a royal pain in the you know what.
After doing some investigating, I discovered that what happened to me has become fairly common. The common element in many cases was that the checks had been sent in window envelopes. One law enforcement source I spoke to told me that they believe rouge postal workers are pocketing envelopes that are obviously checks and selling them to crime syndicates that are the in business of forging the checks. The Post Office maintains that most stolen checks are from thieves breaking into streetside mail drop-offs.
Checks being stolen from mailboxes has become so ubiquitous in some cities that police departments have begun posting warnings to the public like this X post by the Coral Spring PD.
The checks are being deposited remotely through a phone app or at an ATM. In my case, the same check was altered two more times after the first two (four in total) and deposited in various locations, all with a different payee and amount. One organization told me that their check was deposited by a person in Las Vegas. So, this seems to be a nationwide scam operation. There are numerous media accounts in various cities.
In fact, the problem has gotten so bad that last year, the Post Office advised against sending check in the mail at all. According to their statement at the time, over 680,000 checks were stolen from the mail in the previous year.
In talking to the fraud department at my bank and researching the issue, these are the steps that banks and other experts most advise:
- Do as much banking online as possible. Use your bank’s payment site or use the direct payment with your payee, if they are a reputable institution, such as a bank or utility provider. Zelle is another option to pay, which is easy to set up and convenient. However, there has been some fraud around Zelle. There is a well-documented Zelle scam frequently attempted on Facebook Marketplace. Only use Zelle with parties you know well.
- Hand-written checks are harder to forge than computer-generated checks. Some believe that a line of pens known as checking-washing pens make altering the payee and amount more difficult, although some experts dispute their efficacy.
- If you must mail a check, mail it in a regular envelope and wrap the check in a legal-size piece of paper to make it harder to hold up to the light and see what is inside. Throw away any window envelopes you have.
- Do not mail any check in a streetside mailbox but go inside the post office instead.
I got several calls from financial institutions where my forged check had been deposited, to confirm that I had not written the check. Frankly, I was a little dismayed with their seemingly lackadaisical attitude. Each time, I offered some information based on the investigation I had done that I thought might help identify the perpetrators. But basically, I got the “not-my-job” response.
Certainly, there are things that we can do to protect ourselves, but this kind of fraud has societal costs that work their way into the cost of everything. And it seems highly likely that the ill-gotten proceeds are going to finance-organized crime operations. Hopefully, law enforcement and the financial industry will get more serious about catching some of these thieves.
Author’s Note: I must acknowledge that my bride has been warning me for some time to stop sending checks in window envelopes. So, I have suffered through a well-deserved “I told you so” chorus and had to eat a healthy portion of humble pie for disregarding her warnings!