The Federal Reserve’s longstanding commitment to combat fraud and build awareness includes providing education on fraud trends and improving the security of all payments. One form of payment in particular – checks – is seeing a sizable increase in fraudulent appeal.
The ease of committing check fraud is attracting opportunistic individuals and criminal operations alike. In some instances, checks are being swiped from residential mailboxes or drop-off boxes. Then, they’re removing the ink and selling the newly blank check or writing in new information. Surprisingly, this type of fraud is possible despite a slew of robust check security protections (Off-site), such as watermarks, security threads and tamper-evident features. Fraudsters do their best to stay at least one step ahead of the measures taken to catch them and prevent losses.