Quote Originally Posted by Tradd View Post
Friend who insists on still paying all her bills via check got one stolen. Check was washed and she lost a couple of grand. Still refuses to switch to online bill pay. Thinks she’s going to get hacked if she pays anything online. This is not a senior. I told her if she refuses to be sensible and pay online, then she deserves every penny she loses to fraud.
During my tenure as an accounting manager for a county government, we found check washing and the attempted electronic misuse of routing and account numbers was a particularly big problem for the checks issued to people being released from our jail (unspent commissary balances and cash confiscated at processing). For some reason, it was an especially prevalent practice of the “sovereign citizen” movement.

We combatted the problem by instituting a three part audit system with our bank. At the time of issue, we provided a list to our bank of the check number, amount and payee to check when clearing each transaction. In the case of exiting prisoners, we stopped using checks in favor of prefunded credit cards. They really hated that.

Financial fraud is a sort of continuing arms race that took up a huge amount of my time. It tended to make me a bit paranoid in my personal finances.