We had a similar issue with about a dozen checks that were mailed out over 1-2 days about 2 years ago. They were not altered at all, so they were not caught by positive pay. We found out randomly when our operating account bank contacted us after a person deposited one of them into an account at the same bank.
We did some research and somehow discovered a pattern with a group of checks mailed out that were issued over a 2 day period. Some of it came down to contacting the payees on some of the cashed checks to see if in fact they received and deposited those checks. Most of them weren't even endorsed on the back of the check. Some were out of our operating account with one bank, and others were issued out of our escrow account with another bank. The check amounts varied from small tax certification request checks for $25 up to payments for real estate taxes to several tax offices for up to $2000. I think that keeping with relatively lower check amounts help allow them to slip by what banks are reviewing with mobile and ATM deposits not matching payees.
We had to file a report with the local police where we mailed the checks from and the USPS Inspection Service, as well as filing fraud reports with our escrow account bank. For some reason our operating account bank just automatically refunded the amount from the fraudulently cashed checks immediately after we reported the affected check numbers. It took us almost a year to recover all funds returned from our escrow account bank which was based on the fraud reports and them getting the funds back from the banks where the checks were fraudulently cashed.
None of the our checks were altered in any way, and they were deposited into 5+ different banks from the information we were able to obtain. The detective with the local policy had been aware of this happening in the area where people were stealing envelopes with double sided tape in mailboxes or something along those lines. I've periodically seen local news reports about it happening and providing warnings about it in other nearby areas. We typically dropped off our outgoing mail inside a post office that one of our staff passes on their way home. In this particular instance our regular runner was on vacation, so whoever dropped it off those days did so in a regular blue mailbox on the street. We've gone back to only dropping off our outgoing mail directly in the drop slots inside a post office location. We've had no issues as long as we've avoided the blue street side mailboxes.
Jayme P. Zick
The Settlement Company
2150 W Washington St
Allentown, PA 18104
Office: (484)892-6200
Fax: (484)892-6206
Mobile: (610)587-0371
Email: jayme@thesetco.com
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