Not Made Of Money

We received an e-mail from the online company where we purchase our checks. They were advising us to order pens with non-washable ink to prevent check washing. Of course, this sounds just like the type of marketing ploy they could use to sell their special pens, but since this was news to me, I thought I would do a little research to see if I should be concerned about this.

So what is check washing? I looked it up online and found this at the National Check Fraud Center:

Using a process known as check washing, mail snatchers erase the ink on a check with chemicals found in common household cleaning products or on the shelves of your local Walmart and then rewrite the checks to themselves, increasing the amount payable by hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

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Many of these crimes are occuring in conjunction with mail fraud, where a thief steals outgoing mail from an unlocked mailbox, gathers the checks and washes the info from them. Then the thief rewrites the payee and amount fields only.

So how can you protect yourself from check washing?

1. Use a gel based pen. The gels are impervious to the standard household chemicals that are being used in check washing. The kind the online check company is selling is gel-based but costs more than the ones I could buy at my local Target. I will be purchasing some of these gel-based pens on my next Target trip. Maybe I will even be able to find a coupon for them.

2. Don’t put your outgoing mail (bills) in an unlocked box. The raised flag is nothing more than a signal to a thief. Our outgoing mail box is locked and only accessible by the mail carrier.

3. Examine your monthly bank statement upon receipt. Look for any discrepancies between amounts you have recorded as written and amounts cleared by the bank. We use Quicken software so this part is easy for us to do.

4. Shred voided checks. We use a cross-cut shredder for all documents including voided checks.

5. Treat your canceled checks with the same security measures as your checkbook. Our canceled checks are stored on microfilm with our credit union so we don’t have spare copies stored at home.

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