By Ed Avis
As I’m writing this, my wife Kathy – editor of The Costumer magazine – is on the phone with the gas company trying to change our auto-debit account. This is probably the tenth call like this she has made today. Why? Because somebody forged a check on our account yesterday, forcing us to close the account and re-do all the auto-debits with the new account.
It’s crazy because we almost never write checks from that account. Somehow this fraudster learned what our account number was and created a totally fake check, wrote in an amount, and found somewhere – maybe a currency exchange? – to cash it. The only way we knew is that Kathy glanced at our account online yesterday.
Our bank was good about this – I’m sure it happens frequently. They immediately froze our account and walked us through the steps to open a new one. It took an hour or so because the banker carefully recorded all the auto-debits so that they would be honored until we successfully switched them to the new account. They also replaced the money that was stolen within a day.
The hardest part has been switching all the auto-debits to the new account. Kathy is doing this because she handles our household bills. I’m just listening….and it’s not pretty. You would think it should be easy to do this, but from what I’m overhearing, that’s not the case.
Of course, we’re wondering how this happened in the first place. The only check we have written recently was for a Christmas gift to the guy who delivers our newspaper. Oddly, that check was never cashed…did somebody grab it out of the mail and forge it? Seems plausible, but I doubt we’ll ever know.
In the end, this has been a moderate inconvenience in our lives, but it could have been much worse. And definitely we’re going to be more cautious about writing checks or doing anything that can lead to this problem in the future.
I hope this story helps you avoid a similar fate. Here are some tips – most of them pretty obvious – about how to keep your bank account safe.
Check your accounts every day. If you notice something weird, take action immediately.
Set up alerts, such as for low account balance or certain transactions.
Avoid public wi-fi when you’re doing your banking – do it at home.
Don’t click on any links or open emails that you’re not expecting. If you wonder about a link you got, don’t click it! Instead, go directly to your bank’s or credit card’s website.
Shred, shred, shred. Don’t just throw your bills and bank statements in the trash. Take them to a place that shreds them properly.
In case you’re wondering about justice being served, don’t hold your breath. My last question to the banker as we were wrapping up yesterday was what the bank was going to do now. She said the fraud department would look into our case to determine if there was some crack in the security that needed to be fixed, but that’s about it. I read between the lines of what she said and realized that the person who stole our money is probably free to do it again…just hopefully not to us.