About a week ago, I was was subjected to check fraud. Someone intercepted a check I mailed to my landlord, altered every line except my signature, and helped themselves to $10,000 I’d saved to pay my taxes. Here’s what I’ve learned.
First of all, don’t put checks in the mail. Maybe that’s a big ‘duh’ to you, but I’ve mailed checks for all sorts of reasons over the years, and nothing like this had ever happened before. Which brings me to a few tips and tricks you can use to keep the same thing from happening to you:
Send everything certified
From now on, I will likely use certified mail or FedEx if I must get a check somewhere outside of walking distance. Or I’ll ask if they accept some other form of payment all together! This may sound paranoid, but try logging in to your bank account and seeing months of work go up in smoke. Certified mail requires the recipient to sign for the package. While I don’t think my landlord has anything to do with this fraud, I don’t know for sure, and it would be a lot easier to prove either way if someone had signed for my letter to him with the check inside.
Wrap it in paper?
So, a few people have suggested that one way to keep someone from opening your mail and stealing a check is by enclosing it in a folded piece of paper. Ah, the looseleaf defense. Unfortunately, my check was wrapped in several sheets of paper—a new lease, that has been lost to the wind! You can continue to do this, but know it is no more a guarantee of safety than holding a piece of paper in front of your face when someone is about to punch it.
Connect to an app
There are a million different apps that will give you a daily notification about your bank account. Your bank probably has its own. But my bank’s app is slow moving, and weirdly glitchy. Until recently, I’d been hooked up to Digit. Digit helped me save money, but it also updated me daily with my balance. I’ve been meaning to reconnect, but didn’t. Because I wasn’t checking in on the balance regularly or getting notifications, a few days had passed before I noticed the money was gone. And if I hadn’t logged on to pay my taxes (haha) I might not have known for awhile. That would have been bad.
U.S. News actually interviewed Frank Abagnale, an incredibly famous forger who inspired Catch Me If You Can, about what to do to protect yourself, and one of his big suggestions is simply managing your money. If you do get ripped off, you need to be able to prove it:
It is very, very important—and I cannot overemphasize this—to make sure that you reconcile [your checking account statement]. About 51 percent of Americans do not reconcile their bank statement—they don’t even open it. Banks love this because we have a law in the United States called Article 3, Section 406 of the Uniform Commercial Code. It says that you have 30 days from receipt of your statement to notify the bank of any discrepancies that may appear on your statement. If you don’t do that, then the bank has no liability to pay you.
If you go in to the bank three months later and say, ‘Hey, I was overdrawn,’ the first thing they are going to say is, ‘Where is your bank statement?’ You say, ‘Oh, well, I don’t open it.’ They will say, ‘Oh, well, sorry, we’re not paying you.’ So it is very important to stay one step up by simply always making sure that you reconcile, so at least you can go back to the bank and say, ‘Look, I found a forged check.’
I can speak from experience that my bank was pretty suspicious of my fraud report, especially since the check did technically have my John Hancock on it. Imagine if I’d waited 30 days!
Sign up for auto-pay
A lot of your bills can be handled nowadays through auto-pay, which transfers your money directly from your account to the account of a payee. Awesome! Too bad my landlord does not permit that. Certain banks will allow you to set an auto-payment through check instead, and they’ll print it out and mail it. Obviously, a printed check can still potentially be intercepted, but changing it is harder. My check was handwritten, and though the picture of the altered version looks like a mess to me, it presumably would have been a less believable forgery if it had been written over typed numbers.
Check the checkbooks
Again, I don’t know if the thief who stole from me busted open the mailbox or worked somewhere along the mail line. In general, people are told to put their checks in secure mailboxes, not the boxes in their front yards—but I live in New York City, and used one of the good, strong blue boys. I may never know what happened. But if your house has been robbed, or you think your checkbooks have been messed with, go through them from back to front. Thieves often take checks form the center if they can, because it’ll be less likely you’ll notice. Told ya. Paranoid.
And yes, my money was returned by the bank. If I want to pursue the case, I have to file a police report against the person who stole my money, or at least against the name they wrote on my check. But honestly, I’m just glad I can pay my taxes... kind of.