Page 11 - Demo

Slippery Rock Gazette
PSA: Beware!
November 2024 | 11
dries quickly, adheres to the check paper better and is harder to “wash” off. Or look for and use “Fraud Prevention Gel Pens.” One company advertises their gel pens as “protection against water,
fading and fraud”.
• Don’t put checks in your mailbox – Mail them from the post office.
• Use certified mail or a trackable service like UPS or Fed-Ex.
• Use electronic payments when you can – ACH payments, wire transfers and digital wallets help to cut down on check fraud.
• Keep your checks in a secure place – Handymen, contractors, delivery people, caterers, house cleaners, etc. are more likely to be in your home or business during the holidays. Admittedly, all these people are more than likely honest and above board, but there is always a hiring crunch at the holi- days and all it takes is 1 second of tempta- tion for a not-so-honest person to do you in.
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Can you keep a secret? Shhhh, don’t tell anyone what I am about to say. If you tell people, there will be panic in
the streets, and we definitely don’t want that! What’s the secret?
THE HOLIDAYS ARE HERE!
Yep, it’s that time of year. Thanksgiving, Feast of St Nicholas, Hanukkah, Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Las Posadas, Yule, Festivus, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, and so many more, are here.
Along with all these holidays comes an uptick of shopping and gift-giving aka gift purchasing. Meaning... we are shopping in places we wouldn’t normally shop and writ- ing/sending checks we wouldn’t normally write or send.
On a personal level, I can’t remember the last time I wrote a check for anything. I pay most things by automatic payment, the pay- ment option on a lot of websites like credit cards or utilities. Or I use my bank’s bill pay
Sharon Koehler
Stone Industry Consultant
system. So, I was quite surprised to learn that check fraud is up roughly 385% since the pandemic, to more than $1 BILLION per year.
Of that 385%, 87% is mail theft. Meaning: that check you wrote to your sister to cover your part of a holiday expense and put in the mailbox or that check you send to your niece, nephew, cousin, grandkid or friend as a “hol- iday tradition” is in jeopardy of being stolen and fraudulently used to rob you.
How do criminals use your checks? There are many ways, but these are the most popular:
• Check washing – Checks are washed in chemicals to remove the ink and then other payees and amounts can be written on the check, usually for much more than the check was originally written for.
• Check Cooking aka Check Baking – A scammer, crook, criminal, or bad guy just needs to take a digital photo of a stolen check and then use commercially available soft- ware to alter it to make counterfeit checks, more than likely with the intent to clean you out in the process.
• Fake Check Scams – The above-men- tioned scammer, crook, etc. sends you a check or money order worth more than the amount owed to you and instructs you to wire the excess funds back to them before receiv- ing your lump sum payment. After you’ve sent the money, you find out that the check or money order is bogus.
So now that you know how it happens, what can you do to prevent yourself from becoming a victim?
• Write checks with black gel ink pens. It
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