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. . 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
Check washing is a somewhat unsophisticated but effective form of fraud in which a legitimate check’s information is erased chemically or electronically, allowing a criminal to rewrite the amount of the check and the name of the payee. While there may be some defenses such as electronic inks and hidden watermarks to guard against such fraud, check washing works because many recipients accept the check at face value due to the legitimacy of the signature. Because the rudimentary method of check washing can easily damage a paper check, however, many con artists ruin more checks than they can cash. The process of check washing is not especially difficult, although the results can vary widely. In a typical operation, a legitimate check is prepped for check washing by placing a protective seal over the signature line. This could be a low adhesive tape or sticker. The check is then held with tongs and placed in a pan usually containing acetone (nail polish remover), paint thinner or bleach.
Why you should be concerned What you can do to minimize your risk Check washing is a simple, low-tech way to alter a check you have written. It is the chemical erasing of the handwritten parts of a check. The idea is to remove the ink while maintaining the overall appearance of the check and its preprinted items. The concern here is that these chemicals and solvents are readily available everywhere. Once the “washing” has been accomplished, the payee and/or amount may be altered. Often times, the amount remains the same while only the payee is changed. This allows for it to pass by unnoticed when balancing your bank statement. Check washing, and check fraud of all kinds, is a growing concern for the banking industry. Attempted check fraud at the nation’s banks has more than doubled in the past three years reaching an estimated $12.2 billion in 2006, according to the latest American Bankers Association Deposit Account Fraud Survey Report. Actual dollars lost to check fraud was $969 mill
Check washing is the process of taking a completed check – say written by you to the electric company for $200, and using common chemicals, like bleach or acetone, to erase details from the check (this takes only a few minutes and leaves no easily discernible traces), then rewriting the check. The cautious check thief/washer will wash out just the payee name on a check and then write in their own name, take it to your bank with an assumed identity and cash the check. Then they’re off to spend your money, usually days before you even know you’ve been robbed. This leaves the person who wrote the check unaware of the theft until the person to whom the check was originally written calls you asking where their money is. You tell them it was cashed and you can prove it, but when you look at the copy of the check, you find that it seems to have been written, not to the person you wrote it out to, but someone you’ve never heard of before. The more ambitious criminal will not only erase the pay
It is simply the process of washing the check in order to get rid of any writing on it to (usually) change the payee and amount. Understanding why check washing works requries some chemistry knowledge. You first need to know the polarity of the ink that the check is written in. You need to match the polarity of the ink with teh solvent. Unless you have some education in chemistry, you probably won’t know how to figure out the polarity of the dye contained in the ink, and is way beyond the scope of this article. So thus begins my day of washing checks. I went to the local wallyworld to pick up some supplies. • 91% Alcohol (rubbing alcohol) • Nail polish remover (acetone the main chemical) • BIC Round Stic pens • Pentel RSVP pens • Pilot G2 pens • 2 aluminium cake pans Next up, Acetone tests!–> UPDATE!!!!!! I posted a short post on ink polarity for those interested here: How to determine ink polarity.
