Don’t Get Haunted by Check Fraud this Halloween: Protect Your Deposit Channels with Alogent
Combatting check fraud poses significant challenges, as fraudsters often view checks as outdated and easy targets for sophisticated schemes. While advanced payment technologies can greatly reduce overall risk, effectively tackling check fraud requires a comprehensive strategy that combines best practices with innovative solutions. Read on for recent scams and tips on how to protect your financial institution.
Check Fraud News That Will Give You Chills:
- May 2024 – An employee at a financial institution exploited customers to deposit counterfeit checks, open fraudulent loans, and transfer more than $800K to himself and co-conspirators.
- August 2024 – A California bakery, along with 15 other small service industry businesses suffered significant financial losses due to counterfeit check fraud schemes.
- September 2024 - A viral TikTok video featured customers receiving "free" cash from ATMs due to a glitch that allowed people to write and deposit bad checks for large amounts. They quickly withdrew as much money as possible before the checks cleared and ultimately bounced.
- September 2024 – In four midwestern states, individuals utilized stolen checks to create fake entities and accounts, successfully depositing stolen funds. This scam led to the theft of $2.1M out of a total of $10M they attempted to steal, impacting eight financial institutions.
In addition, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) received more than 15,000 Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) reports between February and August 2023 linked to mail theft, totaling more than $688M in transactions. The 2023 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey Report also revealed that 63% of respondents experienced check-related fraud activity, while three-quarters of organizations that use checks intend to keep using them.
Haunted by Fraud? Unify Your Defenses Against Check Fraud Scams with Alogent
Advanced payments technology can significantly reduce fraud exposure, but specifically addressing check fraud requires a comprehensive strategy that combines best practices and with innovative capabilities. Alogent's award-winning deposits automation platform, Unify, is designed to tackle check fraud across all full- and self-service deposit channels. A single platform with one API, Unify applies advanced image analytics tools to detect fraudulent items, including altered or washed checks, check kiting, duplicate deposits, counterfeit checks, and more.
Financial institutions using Unify can take advantage of real-time image and data validations to build a User Scoring Model, enabling them to monitor unique deposit habits effectively. Unify alerts institutions to anomalies in transaction activity, such as high deposit volumes or amounts.
Beyond comprehensive check fraud mitigation, Unify streamlines and simplifies item processing through a transaction-level approach. This allows financial institutions to integrate more automation into their Day 1 and Day 2 workflows, reducing costly corrections and improving operational efficiencies.
Learn more about how Unify approaches check processing differently, speeding processing times, lowering costs, and mitigating fraud effectively.
Download: Unify Solution ebook
Download: Unify Fraud Mitigation Solutions document
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