An interesting check fraud
A woman had her purse stolen, and notified all the appropriate people.
Sometime thereafter another woman went into a branch of the bank and made a bad-check deposit of $5,000 into the compromised account. She said she needed her account number, which she was given (she had the stolen ID), and asked for the balance, which was a bit over $3,900.
She then went to another branch and made another bad deposit of $5,000 and asked if she could get $3,900 back in cash, which she was given, since there was an available balance of $3,900.
While there were systems in place to prevent this – there was a flag on the account – they didn’t work. This is likely a problem that will continue for some time.
This is a simple fraud and very successful. The question for us, the folks who try to prevent frauds, is what could be done to stop the frauds yet not interfere with the business process? Even something as simple as a note on the account that this account may be compromised or simply ignored, as happened in this case. Asking for two forms of photo ID should work, but in this case the faux customer had all of the real customer’s ID, and looked enough like her to pass.
