Mail theft and check fraud continue to increase
WXIN/WTTV – While most Americans have moved on from writing checks and dropping them in the mailbox on a regular basis, the U.S. Treasury Department said check fraud has increased 356% since the COVID-19 pandemic, costing Americans a billion dollars a year.
The FBI and other agencies have consistently warned about increases in mail theft over the last several years. The thefts often lead to check fraud. With modern technology, it's not difficult for a crook to steal a check from an envelope in your mailbox, use a simple bleach to wash off the payee and amount and write it out to themselves for whatever amount they want.
To guard against this, Scamicide says it's a good idea to avoid using a ballpoint pen and go with a gel pen instead. That's because the ink is much more difficult to wash off using chemicals.
However, more tech savvy criminals can also scan your check and use software to change the writing on it. Gel pens won't help against that.
This is why it's important to check your bank statement frequently. As opposed to a scam where a victim gets tricked into giving someone their money, this kind of fraud is outright theft. Banks are much more likely to reimburse the stolen money as long as it's reported within 30 days. After that, the bank isn't required to.
Obviously, the surest way to protect against check fraud is to use electronic transactions for paying bills and exchanging money. Of course, crooks are always looking for ways to target us there, too. That's why you should make sure your passwords and online accounts are more secure than your mailbox.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Boston Globe
41 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Trump hails limited trade agreement with China after talks in London
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Yahoo
an hour ago
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Why Trump Is Losing His Trade War
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Donald Trump's trade war is fast turning into a fiasco. When the president started the war, Team Trump advertised it as certain to be fast, easy, and cheap. Trump would impose tariffs. The world would yield to his will. The tariffs would do everything at once. They would protect U.S. industry from foreign competition without raising prices, and generate vast revenues that would finance other tax cuts. Americans could eat their cake, continue to have the cake, and trade the same cake for pie—all at the same time. 'There's not going to be any pain for American workers,' Trump's press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, vowed in April. The advertising rapidly proved false. The U.S. economy is slowing because of the Trump tariffs; China's is thriving in spite of them. Team Trump falsely promotes vague five-page outlines with alienated former allies as big deals; China is successfully wooing some of its former rivals, such as Vietnam. America's standing in the world is measurably sinking; China's is measurably rising. Courts are ruling that Trump's tariffs are illegal; public opinion mistrusts the tariffs, regarding them as expensive and unproductive. The promise of huge flows of painless money from tariff revenues is evanescing as the fantasy it always was. Oh, and the country's largest chain of Halloween retailers canceled its traditional summer grand opening because of Trump-caused supply disruptions. What comes next, as things go wrong? Trump's first instinct is to blame the targets of his economic aggression for not cooperating with his wishes. On May 30, Trump accused China of violating an imaginary agreement with him. On June 4, he complained that Xi Jinping was 'extremely hard to make a deal with.' 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And on and on, through the whole alphabet of American allies and trading partners. The United States is by far the planet's strongest national economy, producing slightly more than one-quarter of the planet's goods and services. Including its historic and recent partners, the United States could potentially lead a group of nations sufficiently influential to write economic rules that everybody would need to take into account. That fact underpinned the Trans-Pacific Partnership concept of the Obama years: Form a large-enough and attractive-enough club, and China will have no choice but to comply with the founding members' terms. Trump's alternative concept is for a quarter of the world economy to cut itself off from the other three-quarters, and then wait for the three-quarters to beg for mercy from the one-quarter. Unsurprisingly, that concept is fast proving a stinker. But suppose the president sincerely believed that the U.S. had no choice: The one-quarter must fight the three-quarters as a matter of national survival, or 'liberation,' from the tyranny of foreign goods and services, foreign fruits and vegetables. Crazy, but suppose he did. What would follow? A rational president would grasp that a U.S. economic war against the rest of the world would be a big, protracted, and painful undertaking. Such an enormous commitment would require democratic consent from a large majority of the public, all the more so because the United States is starting the war itself. Trump's trade conflict is very much a war of choice. The president must explain why he chose it. A rational president determined to fight an economic war would try to mobilize broad support from the public and from Congress. He would seek allies in Congress, and not only from his own party. He might, for example, compromise on some of his other goals. 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While asking other Americans to accept less, he would not brazenly help himself to more. He certainly would not troll, insult, and demean those who may not have voted for him, but whose cooperation he needs now. This president has, of course, done the most egregious version of every item above. His economic war is adjunct to his partisan culture war. He did not seek broad support. He gleefully offends and alienates everyone outside his base. Which works for him as long as times are prosperous, as they were in the first three years of his first administration. Allow things to get tough, though, and it's a different story. Trump cannot ask for patience and trust, because at least half the country has unalterably judged him as untrustworthy and out only for himself. [David Frum: The ultimate bait and switch of Trump's tariffs] Trump bet his presidency on the theory that trade wars are 'good and easy to win,' as he posted during his first term. His second-term trade war, however, is proving not so easy, and not so good, either. He is fighting it alone, without global allies or domestic consent, because that's his nature. It's now also his problem. In the 1983 movie WarGames, a computer thinks its way through dozens of terrifying nuclear scenarios and concludes: 'The only winning move is not to play.' In other words, the only safe way to conduct a nuclear exchange is never to have one. The same could be said of trade wars, at least when fought by one nation, however big and rich, against all the others, all at once. Trump decided he did not care about Americans' support for his economic war. He did not ask for their backing. He did not make any effort to win it. He willfully alienated at least half of the public. Now that he's losing, his supporters want to scold the country because it rejects the whole misbegotten project as stupid and doomed. Don't listen to their reproaches. This is Trump's war, and his alone. The only way to win now is to end Trump's trade war as rapidly as possible. And then end the excessive, unilateral trade powers of a corrupt president who blundered into a pointless and doomed conflict without justification, plan, or consent. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
an hour ago
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A scam that targeted elderly victims collected more than $11 million. An Arcadia woman pleaded guilty
A San Gabriel Valley woman pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering on Tuesday for her involvement in a scheme that garnered more than $11 million from as many as 180 victims across the United States. Cynthia Song, 43, from Arcadia was arrested in October 2024 by federal authorities and has been in federal custody since, according to a release by the U.S. Department of Justice. For a little under two years, Song worked with a network of co-conspirators to target mainly elderly victims and scam them into sending money to multiple bank accounts in the Los Angeles area, according to authorities. The co-conspirators who contacted the victims worked overseas, impersonating government officials, law enforcement and customer support services. The posers tricked victims with fake threats, like demanding payments to avoid legal consequences and potential computer issues, according to the Department of Justice. The money was sent to bank accounts in the Los Angeles area, controlled by Song and other conspirators she had recruited. It was then immediately sent overseas — mainly to China, the release said. More than 180 victims sent funds to these bank accounts. The payments demanded from victims ranged from $1,000 to $400,000. Once the money was sent overseas, it could not be recovered even after the victim reported the fraud to authorities, according to prosecutors. Read more: Criminal ring with SoCal ties swindled $25 million in COVID relief, small business loans, feds say To take part in the money laundering ring, the release said that Song recruited around 15 people living in the Los Angeles area, mostly of Chinese descent and some who were in the country unlawfully. The recruits were tasked with creating business entities and opening bank accounts, as well as transferring victim payments. Song also trained the recruits to deceive banks from uncovering the fraudulent accounts, according to the release. Documentation from the victims taken by the scammers was used to provide faulty verification for the "large and suspicious wire transfers from victims," the release said. Song and others participating in the scheme took around 5% to 10% of the payments received, before the money was sent overseas, according to prosecutors. Song's next court hearing is scheduled for Sept. 16, when she faces a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years and must pay restitution to her victims, according to the release. Homeland Security Investigations and IRS Criminal Investigations were investigating the case, the release said. Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
