The check is in the mail – unless it’s been stolen

Last Spring, my wife and I finally made the switch from renting to actually owning our first home. We moved ourselves, our two young children, and our cat into our new home and promptly discovered that we had a sewer line problem. Welcome to homeownership! Our house had been built in the 1960s, and the sewer line that runs under our front lawn was an old cast iron pipe that had worn down and broken over the decades and needed to be replaced. We hired a plumbing company to replace the pipe – it was an expensive job (to put it mildly). Here’s a picture of the work:

For some reason, the plumbing crew left without taking our check. When I called the next day to ask how we should get the check to them, they suggested that I mail it. Luckily, I work in credit union compliance and had become aware of the fact that credit unions were seeing a major rise in incidents of checks being stolen out of the mail. Placing a check for such a large amount in the U.S. mail seemed like playing Russian Roulette, so eventually we reached a compromise where an employee of the plumbing company came back to our home to collect it in person.

Unfortunately, other U.S. consumers have not been so lucky, and have mailed checks that were subsequently stolen. NAFCU has heard from many credit unions about stolen checks, and at least one case where the entire postal mailbox (i.e. the big “blue collection box” installed on a sidewalk) had been stolen. NAFCU had also heard that stolen checks were often deposited at certain large banks, possibly because those banks were less proactive in detecting fraud. This week FinCEN finally addressed this issue by publishing an alert on the topic, in “close collaboration” with the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS).

 

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