Tune in to this week’s edition of Money, I’m Home as Lynne is joined by Consumers’ Fraud Specialist Kristy Desimone, to talk about check fraud and how to prevent it!

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0:00:03.0 Lynne Jarman-Johnson (LJJ): Welcome in, I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson with Consumers Credit Union: Money, I’m Home. From finance to fitness, we have it all. And we have such a great series on fraud and fraud prevention, and I’ll tell you what, if you have been out online even and you’re busy doing your day-to-day life, all of a sudden fraud can creep in. Well, we’re going to make sure that that doesn’t happen to you. And today we’re going to talk about something that really is near and dear to my heart, and that is checking accounts! Checks. [chuckle] Kristy I know that sounds weird, but we live in a society now that is totally working constantly with money that we’re exchanging, we’re moving it all over the place. And we’re going to talk about how sometimes checks can have a little bit of an issue going on. Kristy Desimone, you are our fraud monitoring specialist, and you’re monitoring constantly what’s been going on out there in the world, when we’re talking about checking accounts and checks.

0:01:07.2 Kristy Desimone: Yeah, so checks are something that are going to stick around for a long time. They’ve survived many decades of changing economies and things like that, but what we kind of lack is being able to educate those younger members about what checks are supposed to look like and what they mean. [chuckle] So, checks are a piece of paper that is like an IOU. I’m going to pay you these funds, you have to take it to your financial institution, you’ll deposit it, and then it goes through a whole process behind the scenes in order to make sure that it has the funds that it’s supposed to have. One thing that we see a lot of with our younger members is they get emailed checks, so email checks is not something that we typically see as not being fraudulent, it is something that fraudsters like to do, they’ll send you a text message image of a check or they’ll email it to you. And a huge pause moment for our younger members should be, if you don’t have to sign the back of the check because it’s already typed in there, you need to pause for a second and say, “Hey, do I feel this is a good move for me to deposit this check?”

0:02:12.5 LJJ: You know, it’s funny that you say this because there are so many young people that I talk to on a day-to-day basis that they don’t know what a check looks like, because they’re not using them as much as… Perhaps you have your own checking register and you budget every month. But now everything is so digital, is that what is also helping the confusion?

0:02:35.4 KD: Correct, they don’t see how you’re supposed to fill it out or what a check needs to have on the regular basis. A lot of times younger members tell me, “Oh, it’s for my rent, I just use checks to pay my landlord,” so they don’t experience checks on a regular basis, like some of us did growing up, where everything was check. My dad still mails all of his bills out with checks that he writes, and he writes it in his register to make sure he balances, but that’s not the reality that our younger members are facing today.

0:03:03.8 LJJ: Yeah. Are there a couple of things that people can do immediately? Okay, so you say to pause if all of a sudden there’s these red flags that are coming up. But is it okay to walk into your financial institution, show it and say, “This just doesn’t feel right?”

0:03:18.1 KD: Yes, that is so important to do! And I tell members that when they are… When they have a fraud check deposited, I say, “Hey, next time you get a check, bring it in to us, let us take a look, we can show you the red flags, we can have a conversation about it,” because we don’t expect everyone to know everything about checks, but we want to help you, so if you can bring it in to us, we can show you the red flags, show you what it looks like. When you deposit a check, you take the risk for that check, and I don’t think younger members understand that. So, if a fraud check is deposited for $1,000 and all that $1,000 is spent, so you spend it on whatever you want, and then it returns, those funds are adjusted off your account. So, you are responsible for those funds, and then you have to go find the person who gave you the check and get the funds back that way.

0:04:09.9 LJJ: And I’ll tell you that is a scary situation, isn’t it? Where all of a sudden you realize you did something unknowingly, but that all of a sudden got you into a situation where you’re scared about what’s going to happen next.

0:04:24.1 KD: Right, I was watching TikTok the other day, because I love me some TikTok videos. But I was watching TikTok the other day, and a person on there was upset and she had mentioned her financial institution wasn’t helping her, so I did a little digging because I wanted to find out what the story was, and it was a case of check fraud. She had deposited a check from someone whom was requesting her services, she wrote songs, I think, and it was a fraud check and he had asked for some funds back, so she had sent some and used some, and now her account was negative and she was responsible for it, because when you put that check in your account, you assume all of that responsibility.

0:05:03.7 LJJ: Right, and that is what is so important, that it does become so important for you to really understand where that money is coming from, is it a trusted source?

0:05:14.0 KD: Right, exactly. And one of the things too, our older members can do with checks is sometimes they are done with the checkbook, they have a couple left, but it has some of the wrong information on it, they moved. So, they just throw them out. And what happened recently is we had a member throw out a lot of checks and then they started circulating as fraud checks. Somebody had found them in the trash and started writing them out and trying to cash them places.

0:05:39.7 LJJ: Wow.

0:05:42.1 KD: Yeah, so we’ve got to make sure we shred those too, if you’re done with your checks and there’s a couple left and you’re not going to use them, want to make sure we shred that information, [chuckle] which we can do!

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0:05:50.8 LJJ: That is so smart. You mentioned something, and I’m going to bring it up only because life has changed so drastically, you mentioned your dad writing out checks every single time still, and he has his check registry. One of the things that people are doing now is they’re living digitally, and they have the opportunity to be able to check their accounts almost real-time. How important is that for people to stay on top of their finances?

0:06:17.6 KD: Oh, it’s so important, especially when you’re younger and you are living either paycheck-to-paycheck, or you’re a college student and your funds are low and you got to make sure you have enough for gas and for food. It’s always important to be able to live digitally as well. So being able to see those transactions come through and you can see images of checks when they come through your account too, so you can keep track of all of that, which I think is so important.

0:06:44.7 LJJ: Well, just remember, if you’re listening and you don’t know what a check is, that’s your debit card.

0:06:49.2 KD: [laughter] Yes!

0:06:53.7 LJJ: Your debit card is the money attached to your checking account, and that’s real cold, hard cash. [chuckle]

0:07:00.3 KD: It is, and whenever you lose a check too, you want to make sure you alert Consumers because your account number is on the bottom of that, and people are like, “Well, it’s a check, it’s blank,” but they can get your account number, they can try and get information, they could fill the check out themselves, even if it’s blank. So, you want to make sure if the checkbook is in your car and it’s broken in two, or you lose them, you alert us so that we can protect your information.

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0:07:23.7 LJJ: That’s awesome, Kristy. Hey, thank you so much. I really appreciate you stopping in, and it is something that is so important for our members, but for anybody listening, how to stay safe with your money.

0:07:34.5 KD: Thank you, Lynne, I love it. [chuckle]

0:07:37.0 LJJ: And thank you for joining us. If you have a topic that you’d like to share, just send it our way, sure would love to hear from you. Finally, just a big shout out to Jake Esselink. He’s our producer, and does such a great job of all of these. Again, guys, you have a great week, have a safe week financially. We’ll see you on the flip side. Money, I’m Home: From Finance to Fitness with Consumers Credit Union.

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