Question

Negotiable Instruments (NI), and related issue that often affect our lives. Well, well, checks are a great way of paying for goods and or services. However, these days it seems that checks are being used as tender less and less. Again, due to fraud and dishonesty some of the reasons are that retailers are refusing to take checks as payments. This is especially true of smaller businesses that have been "burnt" by accepting checks. So often you will see a posted sign that says, "sorry for the inconvenience, but we cannot take personal checks as payment." Check fraud is a real problem for our society. It costs us so much to recover from them. Banks are repaying customers for stolen checks and it is not fair

On the other hand people steal checks all the time. Once I had a box of checks stolen and the perpetrators used the checks at various places to pay for stuff. In addition, they cashed some of them. That was back in the late 1980's. Online banking was not an option at that time. So it took a long time for me to realize that....Of course, the onus was on me to prove to the bank that my checks were stolen and used. They eventually reimbursed me for cashed one, but not the ones used to pay for services and goods.

Some questions to reflect on: How can we prevent such fraudulent behavior, can check fraud be stopped? Are checks becoming obsolete? How do you feel about online banking?

Answer 1

Prevention such fraudulent behavior can be done in these ways :

• Banks must insist on crossed cheques to prevent cashing of cheques by unauthorized persons
• With the advent of technology, an SMS/email can be sent to the account holder whenever there is a check transaction done
• For cashed checks, the identity of the person cashing the check must be verified

Yes, checks are becoming obsolete with online banking and mobile banking.

Online banking makes delivery of banking services more convenient to the customer as transactions can be done at the click of a button instead of visiting the branch and waiting in queue. However, online banking has created new possibilities of fraudulent activities which did not exist earlier. For example, phishing is a type of online banking fraud where the fraudster extracts crucial information such as passwords, and uses that information to benefit themselves. Online banking, therefore has its merits as well as demerits