Abagnale offered a frightening scenario for business people in our industry to watch out for: "Let's say that I send you a cashiers check and you say to me, well I have this piece of medical equipment and its $26,000 and I received your cashiers check today. But I would like to hold it for five days before I actually ship you this equipment. [The buyer then says] no problem, that's fine with me. Then you [the seller] go deposit it at your bank. What you don't know is that I have adjusted the routing numbers on the bottom of that check so that, for example, a cashiers check off of Citibank in New York would start with the numbers 02. But I would have dropped that zero and made it a one. So you deposit it at your bank in Buffalo and you figure, this will clear in a couple of days--it's a New York bank. In fact that check's on its way to Hawaii. By the time it gets there--they misroute it, recorrect it, restrip it, and send it back--at least 10 days have gone by. So on the fifth day, you ship and then you end up with a notification from the bank that the check is a counterfeit."

Not only are you minus the equipment and the funds, but a small business will typically start drawing on those funds and become liable for those transactions. "Now you're out 20 grand and the bank is going to want [its] money back. The bank could care less about the guy that wrote you the check because he's not the last endorser of the check, you are." (The liability for funds lies with the last signer/endorser of the check.)


Steps You Can Take

How can you avoid being victimized as the payee of a counterfeit or altered cashiers check? Abagnale suggests some strict business practices to button up your operation.

"It is very important that, number one, when you get a cashiers check, call the bank to tell them that you want to verify that this cashiers check is real, because the bank can look up the cashiers check number and tell you. All the bank can say is: Yes, we issued a check for that amount. But I wouldn't go on that alone because some [crooks] are smart enough to go into a bank, buy a cashiers check for $26,000 made out to them, then simply turn around and make a fake one to you and cash the real one. If you called [the bank], they would say, Yes we issued a check with that number for $26,000," he said.

"The banks have gotten so large that they just can't take the time to verify the payee. What's more, they don't want to assume the liability for having told you that the check was good in the first place. What the bank is saying is, I don't know that the check in your hand is a real check. I can't tell if that's the same check we issued. So they are not going to verify it. The bottom line is that you have to look at a cashiers check just like someone saying I'll pay you later. If you get a cashiers check, tell the buyer, It is our policy to hold the item for 15 days before we ship. There's no way [the crooks] can stall it more than 15 days. So you know that in 15 days, if you haven't heard from the bank, the check has cleared."

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