How to Wash Checks
by Liv | Published on October 19th, 2007, 6:01 pm | Advice
Check Washing. It's big business in America. Thieves take your checks from your mailbox and remove the information off the checks and replace it with their own. Now I don't do check fraud, but it sounded like an interesting proposition when my check company said that they had invented some anti-copying technology on their new checks. "We recommend our Security checks, designed with a embedded security strip that prevents your checks from being washed, copied or forged."
Okay, so I contacted my bank and asked if they had some samples of this super check. I was skeptical but after placing a check in bleach, it very clearly lost it's embedded security strip from the check washing. Indeed it even changed the paper brown, which would make me skeptical if I was merchant, to say the least.
Almost any strong solvent is going to remove ink from the paper. The problem arises with check washing though, is even though you may remove the ink written on it, you'll never removed the pre-printed text. Which means you have to cash it in your account, which means you'll get caught. It doesn't make a heck of alot of sense to me, but people must be getting away with it or else it wouldn't be such a big deal.
Supposedly your ability to wash a check varies with the polarization of the fluid used with the check washing versus printed on the paper. I quickly found out online, you're supposed to use nail polish, if you really want to wash a check. Indeed, it did work alot better. The embedded strip stayed right on the check, and it's clear with either bleach, or nail polish remover the checks would lose any information written on them with a cheap pen.
But this got me thinking. Why would someone wash a check? Check washing is complicated, laborious and technically a check is just a piece of papers saying "IOU", and can, for the most part be written on anything that a merchant is willing to accept. We've come to believe that because of Magnetic Image readers, and electronic processing through the federal reserve we have to have checks printed. For the cost it is probably still easier, but for a thief? Why not print your own?
A few years ago when I was poor I did just that? We had no checks and were starving.... I had money in the account, just no way to access it. So I created my own check with a MICR font and handed it too the pizza-man who didn't even bat an eye at the dot-matrix, lines of text and crooked scissor cut paper. He accepted it, not a problem. So I wondered, how much effort would it really take someone to make a fairly decent looking check, passable to the more skeptical pizza man? About 2 hours according to my research?
The unwashed check.
The Bleaching begins.
Notice the discoloration, and the strip has "vanished!"
Even though the strip is gone, it's obvious that someone could still accept it.
Here's the Finger Nail Polish, and notice it's much less discolored, and the strip is still intact.
