Frank Abagnale - The Art of the Steal

Or forgers drive to a wealthy neighborhood and park in a grocery store parking lot. They wait until you pull in in your Porsche or your Jaguar and they follow you into the store. You buy groceries. You have to write your check on a little pad that’s sticking up on the counter. They’re right next to you, loading items onto the counter. They look over your shoulder—most of them are women—and they can memorize your check in eight seconds. All they have to do is glance over your shoulder. You haven’t gotten past writing the date, and they’ve memorized it. Everything on it. They go back and fill out an order coupon. Name and address you’d like on the check? They put your name and address on the check. Style of check? You’ve got flags on your check, so they order checks with flags. How many? Two hundred. Last question: if you’d like these checks sent to an address other than the printed address on the face of the check, so state here. They fill in a P.O. Box. Ten days later, they’ve got your checks.

And don’t think these activities are limited to personal checks. A Fortune 500 company in Chicago got ripped off when somebody outside the organization ordered the company’s business checks through a catalogue—and all he gave them to put on the check was the company’s name and address. He didn’t know where the company banked. He didn’t have an account number. He didn’t know who signed the checks. The person ordered two hundred of the company’s checks and had them sent to him. Then he went to all the grocery stores he could get to and cashed them, because the company was a household word and employed thousands of people. Its checks were gold.

Not long ago, a company in Long Beach, Calif., got a disturbing invoice in the mail from its check printer. The company’s checks were being shipped to 110th Street in Los Angeles. The problem was, the company didn’t have an office there. Someone had reordered the company’s checks and changed the ship-to location to 110th Street. The printer had gotten the reorder with an address change and had simply processed it. One way things like this happen is that criminals recruit company employees to steal check reorder forms. Or they buy them. A stolen check reorder form is worth one hundred dollars on the street.

WHAT TO DO

The solution is to order checks through your bank, not a mail-order catalogue. A crook can’t waltz into Chase or Citibank and try to order your checks. And when you buy checks through a bank, they usually have more security features on them to prevent forgeries. Mail-order houses don’t bother with these things, and that’s why their prices are lower. [Although prices may soar if other states follow Illinois’s example: Illinois, to my knowledge, is the first state to pass a law actually making it a felony to order someone else’s checks. If you live in Illinois and a catalogue sells your checks to a crook you can sue the catalogue company.] Businesses also ought to order their checks through a bank, or else directly from one of the major business check-printing companies, which dispatch a salesman and follow strict ordering procedures to keep your checks from falling into the wrong hands.

HEARD OF THAT SPERM BANK?

A big reason for the proliferation of forged checks is that the tellers and clerks who cash them don’t pay close attention to the IDs they get handed. Even if they do, it’s so easy today for criminals to obtain bogus IDs that look genuine. Recently, a man showed up in Salt Lake City and went around to local banks claiming to be a Russian official doing preparatory work for the Russian Olympic team in advance of the 2002 Winter Games. He had a fake passport and other well-crafted fraudulent documents, and as an added precaution he brought along a young female accomplice who posed as his interpreter. In just three days, banks cashed $90,000 worth of worthless checks for him.

For the less creative forger, there are numerous check cashing stores that require no ID whatsoever, which is the reason they charge steep commissions. But the criminal doesn’t care; the fee’s not coming out of his account.

Too often, tellers and salespeople ignore an important precept, which is to be impressed with the check, not the person. Once, to demonstrate the point before a hidden television camera, I put on an expensive suit and drove up to a bank in a Rolls-Royce, where I managed to successfully cash a fifty-dollar check written on a cocktail napkin because the bank teller was more impressed by my appearance than by what I had handed her. Remember, the way someone looks, what he drives, or how friendly he is has no bearing on whether a check is good. It’s all part of the scam.

I went into a store recently, and if this hadn’t happened I wouldn’t have believed it. I bought a piece of luggage and wrote a check for it. Within a moment, the saleswoman handed me the luggage on the counter and gave me my check back. I looked puzzled, and she said, “Oh, we have a new program. It’s called e-check, from TeleCheck.” I asked her how it worked, and she said, “Well, you wrote me a check, and I put it through this machine that looks like a Scotch tape dispenser. It read your account number off the bottom of it. Then I keyed in the amount of the purchase and it sent all of that data electronically to TeleCheck’s file. Three days from now, the money is automatically deducted from your bank account and it shows up on your statement as an electronic deduction. In the meantime, your check is your receipt.”

I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t resist asking her, “What if I’m not Frank Abagnale? Since you didn’t ask me for any identification, what if I happened to have forged this check? Where’s your evidence?” This is a forger’s dream come true. I write you a check, you give me the merchandise, and you give me the check back. When the police show up and ask for the forged check, you have to say, “Oh, we gave it to the forger.” It’s absolutely amazing. I’d like to know where this was thirty-five years ago when I needed it.

The truth is, people who cash checks today are often so blasé about it, that a forger hardly has to even try. You wouldn’t believe some of the ludicrous checks I’ve run across that stores saw fit to cash. One check cashed in a grocery store in Houston, Texas, for fifty dollars, was literally signed, “I Screwed You.” The bank wrote back, “unauthorized signature.” I guess so. Another check was signed, “U. R. Stuck.” A clerk took that one, too. Another check listed an ordinary person’s name in the upper left-hand corner along with an address. The address read, “Your City, U.S.A.” The bank was listed as National State Bank, also located in Your City, U.S.A. Still another check for ten dollars was cashed at a liquor store in Denver that was drawn off “The Sperm Bank of America.” Must be a new financial institution. The television show, “Dateline,” for a report on check fraud, managed to get a bank to cash a one-thousand-dollar check that had “void” written all over it and the message, “Please Don’t Pay Me. I Am A Counterfeit Check!”

HOT CHECKS

The most common type of bad check is the proverbial “hot” check. A hot check is a check drawn from a legitimate checking account that lacks the funds to cover the amount, or has been written off of an account previously closed.

There are a number of ways to detect a hot check, but many people who cash checks fail to know the easiest one of all. Ninety percent of hot checks are numbered in check sequence between 101 and 200. A check numbered 118 would represent an account about three weeks old. A check number of 1315 suggests an account that’s about three years old. Hence, many retailers over the years have become very leery of cashing so-called new account checks with numbers less than 200.