If a bank gets robbed, it's newsworthy enough to get splashed all
over the media. Yet even taking into account the occasional
multi-million dollar heists, financial institutions lose more than
ten fold that amount to individual frauds. The actual bank robberies
are insured. The onesie-twosie bank fraud are not.
Check fraud costs over $800 million dollars annually, over twelve
times the money stolen by bank robbers.
Some examples of bank fraud:
Who pays?
WE DO!
- Kiting - a bad check is deposited into one account from
another account. Before the bad check has had time to be
processed, another check is issued using the same account
where the bad check was deposited. By the time the bank
learns of the initial bad check deposit, the funds are gone
(and so are the perpetrators).
- Falsifying Loan Applications
- "Booster Checks" - increasing your credit limit on your
credit cards by utilizing "convenience checks" to double or
triple the amount of the amount of the line of credit.
- Merchants can also assist the perpetrator of these
schemes by charging a credit card without the benefit of
providing merchandise. Retailers willing to do this get a
kickback from the card holder.
- Double scans - Hand off your credit or debit card to a
sales clerk, waiter, etc. who then scans your card a second
time to read the magnetic stripe to create a duplicate card.
- Forged checks
- Forged signatures on checks
- Counterfeit checks
- Altered checks