NewsSOS
The US Postal Service states that Postal Inspectors recover over one billion dollars worth of forged checks and money orders annually.
The US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network reports that check fraud doubled from 2021 to 2023.
This surge in activity has led to a common scenario where individuals discover that mailed payments, such as credit card bills or insurance premiums, were never received by the intended payee.
The checks are often stolen from mailboxes and subjected to a process known as check washing. In this fraud scheme, criminals remove the original ink from the check and rewrite it to transfer funds to themselves.
Keep reading