Check Forgery: It Can Happen to You
During a recent personal encounter with white collar crime, CIO.com's Bill Snyder learned that check forgery is shockingly easy and check writing software companies do little to prevent counterfeiting. Here's how he survived check theft and learned to protect himself.
Tue, January 24, 2012
CIO — Want to hack someone's bank account? You might think it takes a sophisticated knowledge of computer security or maybe a tie with the Russian computer mafia. It doesn't.
All you need is a perfectly legal check writing application that costs $14.95, a laser printer and a fake I.D. How do I know? I was hacked recently, and it isn't fun. I've learned how shockingly easy, and surprisingly low-tech, forgery has become. And I've also learned that an alert bank employee paying attention to her job could be the best defense money can buy.
My brush with white-collar crime began with a phone call a few weeks ago. An employee at a local branch of the Bank of America here in San Francisco wanted to know if I'd written a check for $438 to someone named Ana Gonzalez. Who? No, I hadn't. I'd never heard of Ana Gonzalez.
So Kelly, an assistant manager, said she'd become suspicious because "Ana" had offered a so-called VersaCheck, and those are a red flag for forgery. It turns out that VersaCheck isn't quite the right description. What she meant was a check produced by check writing software. Because VersaCheck is a well-known name, some people use it the way Kleenex is used to describe a tissue. There are many check writing applications available; simply do a quick Web search and you'll find lots of them.
Kelly — I'm not using her last name because my interactions with her had nothing to do with my being a journalist, and it's not kosher to put her name out without getting permission from her and the bank — questioned Ana and even made her put a thumb print on the check. And when Ana's answers and nervous manner confirmed her suspicions, Kelly refused to cash it and kept it.
The next day, I got a similar call from a bank employee at a different Bank of America branch. Same story, different name on the check. Also not accepted. Now, I'm getting alarmed. I obtained photo copies of the checks and noticed that they were numbered in sequence with the last couple of checks I had written, and even worse, both had signatures that looked a lot like mine.
The checks had my correct address and in the upper left-hand corner, and the correct series of numbers and symbols representing my BofA account across the bottom. But these weren't stolen checks. They lacked the rather elaborate design the bank puts on its checks, which is why they were obviously produced using check-writing software.
