Be Aware About Counterfeit Check Scams
by You opened your mail and – wow – you just won a lottery. The letter has a cashier’s check to cover the taxes and fees and in order for you to get your winnings, you need to deposit the check and then wire the money to the sender so that the taxes and fees will be paid.
The lottery is only a trick to get you to wire money to someone you don’t even know. The scammers through the letter they sent will instruct you to deposit the check and wire the money then your bank would soon learn that the check was a fake. You will be at a loss because the money you wired can’t be retrieved and YOU are now responsible for the checks you deposit. Sad to say that even though you don’t know they’re fake, you will still pay for it. This is is only an example of a counterfeit check scam that could leave you miserable and this type of counterfeit check scams are on the rise. Some fake checks look so real that bank tellers end up being fooled.
The high tech criminals use quality printers and scanners to make the checks look so much real and they even contain authentic-looking logos and watermarks printed with the names and addresses of legitimate financial institutions. Even if the bank and account and routing numbers listed on a counterfeit check may be real, the check is a fake. These fake checks could be corporate, personal cashier’s or money orders checks. Criminals use counterfeit checks to pay for purchases made on the Internet and they tell the seller that they will send a cashiers check for the purchase price which also includes shipping costs. In addition to that, the fraudster will also say that since the shipping costs isn’t known yet, it would be good to send more than enough money to cover this cost. The fraudster will tell the innocent seller to wire the excess funds back once they receive the check and ship the goods. The seller will be late to realize that the cashier’s check was fake while the fraudster had already received both the money and the goods for FREE!
To avoid becoming a victim, learn how to recognize a few “red flags” in a counterfeit check:
- word VOID slightly appears across the check
- check lacks some perforations
- check number is sometimes missing
- font type varies on different areas of the check
- maker’s address is missing
- drawee’s bank address is nowhere to be found on the check
- number on the bottom of the check does not match the check number in any part on the check
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