Check fraud is back in a big way, fueled by a rise in organized crime that is forcing small businesses and individuals to take additional safety measures or to avoid sending checks through the mail altogether. Banks reported roughly 680,000 reports of check fraud to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, also known as FinCEN, last year. That’s up from 350,000 reports in 2021. Officials are warning Americans to avoid mailing checks if possible, or at least to use a secure mail drop such as inside the post office.
It’s completely baffeling to me how an advanced country like the US can still be stuck with such an obsolete system.
Seriously - it’s 2023, why are we still moving money around with paper IOUs
Same reason US politicians insist on having AM radio in cars, we mostly hate electronic voting, and a lot of people still like cold hard cash
I say this as a tech enthusiast myself: we vastly, collectively underestimate the fragility of high technology. Not just fragility of the operation, but fragility in the supply chain (silicon manufacturing is super specialized and centered in one of the world’s most contested locations: Taiwan), fragility in the event of disaster, and fragility of the digital security.
I’m not sure that checks rate any better in security here, or in reliability. The check doesn’t have any mechanism within it to verify that there’s actually money to be moved, and doesn’t guarantee that the payment is yours irrevocably. It also doesn’t verify the actual intent to move money, or that the writer of the check is authorized to do so. I get that digital systems have vulnerabilities but let’s not pretend that this paper system doesn’t.
but the checks themselves are irrelevant, they get converted into electronic information as soon as they hit the scanner
whose validty is verified by…checks notes…the payer’s penmanship when writing their name in cursive
There are so many small to midsize business that are still paying with paper checks for whatever reason even when other options are available.
My wife is an accountant and some of the stories she tells about helping business try to get paper checks to government entities to pay taxes or fees just leave me shaking my head every time.