You may think that it’s absolutely absurd to give someone a blank check.  As do I.  But the problem lies in the fact that you’re probably doing it everyday.  What you say?  Well whenever you hand a check to anyone you’re giving them the ability to use that check in a dishonest way.  Technology is such that the manipulation of checks is somewhat easier than what it was 20 years ago.

To define check washing further, check washing is the process that occurs when a criminal uses a written check that is not his, washes it, in the sense of changing the details of the check, then rewrites the check so that it can be used on a shopping spree or similar type of dishonest occurrence for his personal or related benefit.  The most common way of this occurring is whereby the criminal simply changes the name on the check to his or hers.  Imagine paying off your car loan of $4000 and the person who receives the check at the bank then goes on to subsequently insert his name on the check after wiping out the banks.  That would then give him or her the ability to use that check for his own individual purposes.  What makes this process even harder to detect is the fact that it may take several months before you notice that your car loan hasn’t been paid off.  This gives ample time for the criminal to hide his dirty work and get away with the crime.

This most likely occurrence of this crime isn’t going to be at a bank more likely than not, it’ll be at your mailbox.  Whenever you raise that red flag on your letterbox each and everyday illustrating that you want mail picked up, a criminal could see that as a welcome sign to come and pick up your checks.  These checks can subsequently be ‘washed’ and used in a criminal manner.  It’s best to ensure that you don’t even put checks in the mail to pay any bills to make sure that this is never even possible.  However, if you must do this, there are some ways which can help prevent the occurrence of criminality or more specifically, check washing from occurring.

If you don’t have time to drop your mail off at appropriate letterboxes or the post office you can do some of the following things to ensure you don’t suffer the crime of check washing.  Most apartment buildings do have locked mailboxes that you can use to secure your outgoing mail.  Use types of pens that aren’t as easy to wash off.  Pens that are gel based or permanent marker type pens are the hardest to wash off.  Don’t use roller pens or felt tip pens because these are easier to manipulate and ‘wash’.  Further to that, ensure your checks are printed on chemical based paper to ensure that if someone does attempt to wash the check, the chemicals on the paper will mean the paper smudges and thus makes it virtually impossible for criminals to ‘wash’.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.